The Bing team have released a flavour of IE8 that takes full advantage of the simple but effective extensibility of the browser, which is quite a nice idea including:

• Bing Toolbar – Instant access to News, Email Video and more
• Bing Weather webslice – Get the latest weather and forecast for your location
• Bing Images search and accelerator  - A visual preview of the images round the web as indexed by Bing
• Bing Video search and accelerator - A visual preview of the videos round the web as indexed by Bing
• Ciao offers webslice - Top lists direct from the Ciao! editorial team, pulling together the hottest products available
• Ciao visual search - A direct site search of Ciao list products, with price comparisons consumer reviews
• A selection of Bing bookmarked favourites and the Bing search homepage.

If you’ve already got IE8 then you can get these addons individually from the addons site.

These little extensions are simple to build and deploy but remarkably effective when put to work for a brand.

Interesting to see that Dean Hachamovitch will be talking IE9 at MIX. Apparently there’ll be a few surprises.

Meantime (and I realise that dedicated followers will realise the age of this visual gag), in addition to using IE8 I’m also making use of this IE8 pen that Giorgio left me when he was visiting. It has some of the features of IE8 too:

General Configuration

InPrivate Mode

Using WebSlices

Anyway, you get the idea with that… If you don’t know much about IE8 then let me point you at the weighty tome of MSDN.

If you’d like to watch a video about how IE8 can help you ‘do the web more safely, and a bit quicker’ (that’s not an official phrase – I just made it up) then you can see us messing about at Tesco here and see how IE8 worked for them.

Talking of Flash and Macs (don’t say that too fast!) I was reading this article from Tim Anderson on improvements to Flash on a Mac. It struck me that I didn’t realise it was that bad in the first place – but “I’m a PC” so there you go. No wonder His Jobsness isn’t a fan.

Anyway, I notice that Kevin Lynch also says:

“… there are variations depending on the browser as well as the OS -- for example, on Windows, IE8 is able to run Flash about 20% faster than Firefox.”