Many people mistake Internet Explorer as the oldest and first web browser. It wasn’t and was a few years late to the browsing party. However, as the browser was shipped with the Windows operating system (and with Mac OS until a few years ago) it quickly dominated the market. After Internet Explorer 6 was released, there was a big gap before the next edition was made available and, at that stage, we all wondered if there would be further major development with the web browser.

We needn’t have worried as Microsoft are still working hard on the next version of Internet Explorer and have not only previewed new features but made the first preview release available to the general public.

New features include Activities, which enable you to perform functions based on, for example, an address listed in a web page. If you want to find out exactly where a restaurant is located, you can right-click on the address and then find the location with Microsoft Live Maps. You can also right-click and share the information with Digg, Facebook and other social networking environments. You can now add your favourites to a link bar on the main interface, prevent losing open tabs with the automatic crash recovery tool and an improved anti-phishing tool is included.

Note that this is still the first beta preview and is a Windows XP SP2 only release. You can download a version for Windows Vista separately.