Don't be tempted to download the early beta of Internet Express 8 on the assumption that you can use it as your main browser. It has been posted to help developers build support for some of the new features into web sites, and is too unstable to be used for anything but testing. Just calling up the history bar was enough to crash it on my machine, and you do not get the option to install it alongside IE 7 so that you have that version to fall back on.

The new Automatic Crash Protection features kicks in occasionally to restore one tab when another crashes. But IE8 can also go into a loop where it crashes every time you start it up, apparently because it tries to return to the status quo ante. If this happens to you, right-click the IE icon and choose the 'Start without add-ons' option, then close and reopen the browser as normal.

The new Activities and WebSlice features, outlined yesterday, look interesting but few sites yet support them and I could not find anything to try them on. Even the Microsoft Add Activities page turned up errors.

In short there is very little in this build to review. This may change as Microsoft tweaks the code and developers post IE8-savvy pages. We'll keep trying and keep you updated.