Internet Explorer 8 (MSIE 8) has been in development since August 2007. In March 2008, a public beta (Beta 1) was released to the general public. Microsoft has revealed a list of the new features in IE8, including two interesting new additions called Activities and WebSlices:
Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
WebSlices 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.