Today at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas the IE team announced a public beta of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for web developers.  This beta release does not change the UI much but introduces the new so called standards based rendering engine among other new features.  Highlights includes new developer tools, Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are new ways for developers to offer the services of their sites on other sites, removing the need for copy and paste. When you select text and right click you will see a list of available activities.  One of the default activities allows you to see a map of an address you selected. Users add activities just like you add more search engines in the search box. Microsoft has created an Add Activity provider page where you can easily add more Activities from popular web site.  For a cool demo, watch the video below about Activities.

Video: Internet Explorer 8 Activities

WebSlices are another new feature in IE 8 that allows you to subscribe to updates on a web site. One useful demonstration of this is a WebSlice for an eBay auction.  You can easily see the changes to an auction by hovering over the item that was placed on your favorites bar when you subscribed to it.  The feature works with many popular sites such as Facebook to easily see updates without actually going to the web page. Just like Activities, you subscribe to Activities in a similar fashion but instead of going to a page that list Activities you can add, you just hover over the content and the WebSlice icon will appear if the site supports it.  Check out the video demonstration for more information.

Video: Internet Explorer 8 WebSlices

This beta release of Internet Explorer was released only for web designers. A lot of websites, including WinGeek.com do not render properly in IE8 because of changes to the render engine.  Thankfully Microsoft created an "Emulate IE7" mode so users can still view web pages that don’t render properly in IE8 (Installing IE8 removes IE7). If you would like to test IE8 , download here.

To see IE8 Beta 1 in action, check out the WinGeek screenshot gallery.