Microsoft has made Internet Explorer 8 available for download here.

At present, the download is in Beta form and is aimed mainly at programmers and developers, although there is nothing stopping regular browsers downloading and having a play.

Initial impressions: IE8 is quite a handsome beast but it won’t be replacing Firefox or Opera in our hearts (or on our desktops) anytime soon. Basically, this offering appears to be Microsoft playing catch up, trying to offer extensions a la Firefox but not quite “getting it”. The lines are clean, usability is improved from IE7

Some of the more interesting features include

• Facebook integration, whereby you can get your friends’ status updates in the IE toolbar. While the latest figures suggest that Facebook use has peaked and that it’s all downhill from here, this is undeniably a cool feature.
• Ebay integration. Rather like the Facebook updates, you get updates in the toolbar for specific pages. In theory this should mean alerts when something you are waiting for becomes available, and updates on the cost of items you are watching, bidding on, etc.
• Look up on Encarta (remember that?)
• Stumbleupon toolbar.
• Live Maps integration.

One key development in the browser is called Webslices, which allows information from sites (like Ebay, Stumbleupon and Facebook) to be included in the browser. This works a bit like an RSS feed and offers you “highlights” of sites that you are interested in.

Microsoft, being Microsoft, will never release software which can be adapted like Firefox. In reality this means that people with very specific demands for browsers (SEO companies, for example) will continue to use, modify and love Firefox for the foreseeable future.

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Upstream Connections - a Brighton SEO