Safari in OS X Leopard let you drag and select a specific portion of a webpage, so it would be saved as a widget viewable from the "dashboard". For example, if you wanted to keep checking an ebay auction you could snip out a widget and use that instead of constantly re-checking the page. IE8 has a similar feature called "slices". Right now you can't just select anything, only webpages that have been designed to work with the feature. You can save something as a slice and it works like an RSS feed, you are informed when it updates. You can only view a slice from within the browser however.
There is also a new feature called "activities" where you can perform certain actions on a webpage and add your own. For example, if you highlight a block of text, an icon appears and clicking it produces a context menu, where you can blog it on windows live spaces, translate it or search it in Encarta. Presumably the browser Flock offers similar capability since it is centred around blogging and whatnot.
There's also something called a "safety filter" which expands upon IE7's phishing filter and can warn you of potentially unsafe downloads an such. One interesting thing I noticed is how the address bar highlights the page's domain name, like so:
This means that phishing sites which use numerous subdomains so they look like legitimate sites won't work so well because their real domain name is highlighted. Supposedly Firefox 3 Beta 3 has this feature too but I've yet to verify it myself.
The most important part for me was their improvements to the rendering engine. IE8 now passes the Acid2 test, however it only does so at one specific URL, not on any of the copies around the internet. This is down to some security feature in IE that handles cross-domain scripting or something. Still, it's an improvement, so hats off. There's a set of developer tools that have been added, I've yet to make use of these myself but they seem decent. Right now a lot of big websites are horrendously broken in it. GameSpot is no exception. The website yourewinner.com which I frequent is also broken much to my dismay. This is partly down to the rendering engine being a beta, and partly because that site's design was made by me. However, another forum theme I made elsewhere largely works fine so champagne all around. For a much more detailed look at the engine improvements, read this.
Overall IE8 is a nice improvement. Speed-wise it seems much faster than IE7, and there are some interesting new features. It's nice to see the new effort to conform to web standards, even if it is only a minimal one right now. Perhaps IE8 may turn out to bring IE back up to date.
For the sake of comparison I thought I'd give a look at the new Opera and Firefox betas:
Opera 9.5
Being an Opera user myself I'm more fond of this beta than IE8 and Fx3. But regardless, here are my thoughts. One of the biggest improvements here is the speed. It's much faster than the current versions of Opera and faster than IE8 and Fx3 betas (however, they're all very fast so on a good connection the difference may be negligible). There are also a number of new features, such as the address bar doubling as a history search. If you type a phrase into the address bar, it returns all websites that include that phrase in either the URL, page title, or page content. It's pretty handy because I have a habit of not bookmarking interesting pages then forgetting their URLs. The default UI is also different so it fits in with other popular browsers, so as to not alienate new users.
Something else that's new is "Opera Link", whereby if you have an account on Opera's website you can store all your bookmarks, speed-dial pages, etc. Then on another browser or computer you can synchronise these so you can keep your bookmarks etc across multiple computers, like services such as del.icio.us. Though Opera uses tabbed browsing you can still have multiple windows open, and should you close one of them you can recover that whole window, where normally all the pages would have been lost. There are many other small fixes and inclusions but I'm not going to bother listing them here.
The final big change is in the rendering engine, it handles many standards better and includes more support for CSS3. It also gets full marks on the CSS3 selectors test. Overall it's a good improvement over the previous versions of Opera and has a nice set of new features.
Firefox 3 Beta 3
There's not much I can say about this because of two major flaws:
1) It takes an astronomically long time to load - anywhere up to 10 minutes
2) It does not load any webpages whatsoever, it just will not connect.
The previous betas of Fx3 worked fine, I have no idea why this one is so horrendously broken. However I still have a good idea of what browsing is like with it so let's roll on.
Firefox 3b3 has a new icon set, including some relentlessly ugly back/forward buttons. These might be a temporary thing for the beta, however. There are a good range of new features, such as address bar history search like that in Opera 9.5 (however, firefox's only searches the URL and page title, not the page content). There is now more easily accessible information about website encryption and whatnot, and you can change settings on a site-by-site basis. None of these features excite me because they were already in Opera, but hats-off to Mozilla for including them in Fx3. Speed-wise, it's also a big improvement over it's previous version. The beta 2 version that I got rid of this morning seemed to be the slowest of the three browsers I'm testing but it was nonetheless a very fast browser. Of course I've yet to do a proper test with accurate timings and whatnot.
They've also included something called "places" or whatever. I'm not really sure how this works but it involves bookmarking in some form and it is probably appealing to people who enjoy "social browsing".
Overall Opera 9.5 is my favourite of the three, but IE8 is showing to be the much needed boost that IE needs, and Firefox 3 looks to be a worthy competitor for the two. However my main interest was towards IE8, which surprised me by being decent for once. I am aware that there is a Safari 3 beta out but the windows version is greatly lacking in useful features (it's really just a barebones browser with some eyecandy, though it is also very fast and has a competent rendering engine), and ultimately not worth my time writing about. Apple have paid more attention to the Mac OS X version of Safari.