The two new headline capabilities in IE8 are Ac¬tivities and WebSlices. Both are designed to add functionality from third-party services without re¬quiring you to leave the page you're viewing.

The Activities feature reminds me a bit ofYa¬hoot Shortcuts which, when you hover the cursor over dot-underlined text, pops up options that let you, for example, map a place name or add an e¬mail address contact list. Activity options in IE8 in¬clude Translate, Send, Map, Find, Define, and B1og. Just by highlighting a paragraph, I got a northeast pointing green arrow that dropped down choices for Activities I'd installed.

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I was thinking my "Find product with eBay" ac¬tion would display in the first list, but it was available only from "More activities." The feature is as a bit flaky at this point: It would work the first time I used it in a page, and then I'd have to reload the page to see it again.

When I highlighted the text "MacBook Air" on the PCMag.com site, I was rewarded with the Ac¬tivity arrow/drop-down and was able to map the nearest location-Muskoka Airport-in a small window over the page. Hmm. Clearly there's some work to be done here, since and airport doesn't really have a lot to do with a laptop that happens to have "air" in its name, but it shows the technology's potential.

I was unable to find any results in the eBay Activity, but its small window is brimming with potential. You don't even have to click on the activity you want in the arrow drop-down; just hov¬er the mouse over it, and, in this case, for example, a map displays.