Microsoft today released IE8 Beta 2 for public download. The newest iteration of the browser was created around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

The new browser promises an improved tab and navigation experience. When navigating to a web site in IE8, the smart address bar searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds to suggests possible urls that match your input.

Users can reopen tabs they’ve closed since starting IE, and IE8 figures out relationships between tabs and groups them together and color codes them e.g. tabs that came from the links in the search results page are grouped together and colored differently from the headlines the user followed off another page which are different from links the user followed off other pages.

IE8 also comes with enhanced new privacy features such as browsing InPrivate and Blocking.

Download and try it out at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.