Microsoft Announces AIEEEEEEE!!!!!! 8

Turns out the highlight of today’s MIX08 event wasn’t Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio, but IE8 (Internet Explorer 8). Speaking at the Microsoft Web development conference, Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group’s general manager, announced IE8 Beta 1. In addition to Web standards compliance, the new browser showcases some new features and improvements, among them
Activities–”contextual services to quickly access a service from any Web page”–and Web Slices, “a new feature for Web sites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a Web page.”

These sound pretty slick. Still, as Joe Wilcox notes over at Microsoft Watch, it’s a little odd that Microsoft would introduce proprietary browser specifications like these after its recent commitments to interoperability.