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Although IE8 was released in Beta 1 form three months ago, until today, Microsoft has refused to give a firm target date for the second preview version.

However the new browser will have features, which will be developer-created and not user-created.

For example, Activities, a small-scale mash-up tool, lets developers designate selected keywords for one-button use in other online services, such as an eBay auction search.

Web Slices, on the other hand, resembles the Web Clip feature in Apple Safari which lets users subscribe to small content chunks within a site.

And in terms of stability, IE 8's new automatic crash recovery feature is designed to solve one major problem that most IE users know all too well - when an IE window or tab freezes or crashes, other browsers instances or tabs will likely become inoperable as well.

Automatic crash recovery does a better job of separating tabs within the same browser so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other.

According to the most recent data from metrics firm Net Applications, IE accounted for nearly 74 per cent of all browsers used worldwide in May. IE8, however, held just a 0.03 per cent share or less than 5 per cent the 0.63 per cent global share owned by the beta version of Firefox 3.0.