Microsoft has made the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 available for download. While generally keeping the same design as IE 7, this new version features some new functionality and is also fully standard-compliant.

First of all bear in mind that this beta of Internet Explorer 8 is intended solely for web developers and designers, not for the average user. This beta is still under heavy development and may not work properly with certain web pages. True, you've got a button to "emulate" IE7 while running IE8 but that's not the point. So if you're not a programmer or do not like strong emotions you'd better stay away from this one.

Internet Explorer 8 includes a couple of exciting new features: Activities and Weclips. The first ones are a collection of customizable add-ons that let you access online services from the browser's context menu. As for webclips, they work like RSS feeds, but focusing only on certain areas of a given webpage that are being constantly updated. Besides these two elements, Internet Explorer also features some other goodies like integration with Facebook and Live Maps and a crash recovery system.

This first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 lets you take a sneak peek at the future next version of Microsoft's web browser and start playing with its new feature. For a more extended review, check out our blog OnSoftware.