MICROSOFT HAS released a public beta version of the next Internet Explorer-but don't download it expecting either a stable browser or stunning innovation.
Its developers say Internet Explorer 8 better supports Web standards, can automatically recover from a crash, and includes new features.

One of these is Activities, plug-ins that eliminate some tedious cutting and pasting. Highlight a street address, and you can automatically bring up a map of that loca-
tion. Another new feature, called Web Slices, lets you track changes to a portion of a Web site-for instance, a specific eBay auction.

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The beta is clearly buggy: when we tried installing Internet Explorer 8, it crashed often and seemed to conflict with multiple apps on the system. The Web Slic¬es feature seems already to trail Safari's Web Clips tech¬nology, which lets you trans¬form a piece of any Web page into an automatically updating widget on an OS X desktop.

Internet Explorer 8's version works only ifthe site's developer enables it. And because the slices live in an Internet Explorer tool¬bar, you still have to open your browser in order to see new activity. Microsoft hasn't specified when Internet Explorer 8 will be final.