Internet Explorer 8.0

Internet Explorer 8.0 is the latest version of Internet Explorer and has been in development since August 2007 at the latest. On March 5, 2008, the first public beta (Beta 1) was released to the general public. On August 27, 2008, the second public beta (Beta 2) was released. It supports Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 on both 32-bit as well as 64-bit architectures.

Security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, CSS, and Ajax support are Microsoft's priorities for IE8. It includes much stricter compliance with web standards, including a planned full Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 compliance for the release version. All these changes allow Internet Explorer 8 to pass the Acid2 test. However, to prevent compatibility issues, IE8 also includes the IE7 rendering behavior. Sites that expect IE7 quirks can disable the IE8's breaking changes by including a meta element.

IE8 also includes numerous improvements to JavaScript support as well as performance improvements. It includes support for Accelerators - which allow supported web applications to be invoked without explicitly navigating to them - and WebSlices - which allows portions of page to be subscribed to and monitored from a redesigned Favorites Bar. Other features include InPrivate privacy features, and SmartScreen phishing filter.

source:-http://www.en.wikipedia.org/