Microsoft shipped the Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8 -- the first new version since 2006's Internet Explorer 7, which itself marked the first major update to IE since Internet Explorer 6 shipped back in 2001.

IE 8 -- available for Windows XP and Vista -- doesn't look all that different from IE 7, but it seems to pack in a considerable number of helpful, if overdue, usability refinements.

Most of them involve tabbed browsing. In IE 8, this no longer feels bolted on as it did in IE 7; there isn't that same distracting pause while the browser opens a new tab. The "about:Tabs" page that displays if you click the new-tab button now offers useful links (for instance, to reopen tabs you'd closed before) instead of just an introduction to the concept. And if you right-click to open a series of links from one page in adjacent tabs, IE 8 highlights their tab bars in the same color to help you keep track of them.

IE 8 also catches up to its competitors in a few ways. It -- finally -- has a find-on-this-page text search as quick and convenient as the one in Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari. You can also now right-click on selected text to search for those words in your default search engine, but IE 8 also lets you expand this right-click menu with "Accelerators" that provide additional functions (say, directing that same search to a mapping site). Its address-bar auto-complete works much like the intelligent version I love in Firefox 3. And IE 8 provides "inPrivate Browsing," a rough equivalent of Safari's "Private Browsing" feature, which wipes out all records of your Internet activity when you're done. (Some of you may know this feature by another name.)

IE 8's "Web Slices" sound a lot like the Mac version of Safari's Web Clips. But while Web Clips work with any Web site, Web Slices require some extra coding at the site you're trying to clip... er, slice for faster access.

Download http://www.microsoft.com/windows/int...a/default.aspx