I've been playing with IE8 beta 1, and I've got some thoughts ... In terms of user visible HTML rendering features, I think IE 8 beta 1 is possibly the biggest release of IE since April 1997 when IE 4.0 alpha 1 was released. The history shows mostly bug fixes, and chrome changes since then. Maybe transparent PNG or Bidi text are bigger than Activities? It looks like that's going to be the feature that most people talk about, so I'm going to talk about some of the other stuff. There are 3 big things I'm interested in, and a few smaller features: