As was the case with IE 7 be VERY careful if you’re trying this out at home/work as by default IE 8 replaces your IE 7 installation.
With IE 8 Microsoft has also been somewhat more explicit than they were with IE 7 in terms of setup options.
They also have some interesting setup options for something that they call ‘Activity Providers’ . Things like blog services, maps and translation services among numerous others.
Things like
WebSlices which according to Microsoft’s description, “is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by
subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave
just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and
notify the user of changes.”
They’ve also defaulted to a more standards compliant mode by default for IE 8. While standards sound nice, the brutal reality is that in a quick look through with IE 8 I found that many sites just don’t look right. Sure there is an IE 7 mode to look at sites, but I suspect the standards compliance issue will be the biggest hurdle facing both Microsoft and its users with this first release of IE 8
