What’s new in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2?

New Tab experience

Here’s what you are going to see after new tab opened

Click to Enlarge

IE8 takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which. Below, the tabs that came from the links in the search results page are grouped together and colored differently from the headlines the user followed off another page, which are different from links the user followed off other pages:

Click to Enlarge

IE8 has finally received a Smart Address Bar which will surely increase users experience.

Click to Enlarge

Visual Search

As well as increased Safety and better web standards support.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.

Download
Upgrade Guide

Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to 2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7.

I think that it’s a great improvement and Internet Explorer 8 Final will probably be even faster.

Now here’s what else IE 8 is going to offer:

Scripting Improvements
Memory Management Improvements
Networking Improvements
Rendering Engine Improvements
New Developer Features
Data URI
Selectors API
JSON

and much more.

[digg-reddit-me]

For a more detailed list of IE8 improvements, check this blog post.