IE 8 Beta 1 is released

I’m a huge fan of the great work the IE team is doing for this release.  The first beta, targetted mainly at web developers, is now available.  In addition to excellent standards support, it includes some cool new user-facing features like “Web Slices,” Activities (XML driven extensions for doing things like mapping an address), automatic crash recovery, and more.

My favorite feature out of those?  The fact that IE now separates the tabs and the frame into separate processes.  This is part of Automatic Crash Recovery (link contains detailed explanation).  Here are some of the effects of this change that I have enjoyed:

1. When a web page / add-in (like Flash) crashes, you hardly even notice.  The tab(s) restart automatically and the only thing you notice is the little balloon telling you that IE just recovered a crashed web page.
2. Crash recovery saves form data whenever possible.
3. No longer do you need to launch links to trusted/intranet zones into a new window.  In IE7, this was necessary because the process has to start with a higher integrity level (Protected Mode: Off).  Now, because the frame is one process and the tabs are separate, you can have one tab with Protected Mode turned on, and one with it turned off, in the same window.
4. No more ieuser.exe needed, since the frame runs at normal IL and serves the purpose that ieuser.exe used to serve.

Click here for more information about IE 8 beta 1.