Today brings us a bit of an update on how things are coming along with Internet Explorer 8. It has just reached Beta 2 status and unlike Beta 1 which was soley for developers, this one's a public Beta.

Some of the new features added to Beta 2 include tab groups, accelerators and compatibility view which helps display web pages in a more orderly fashion which were designed for older browsers.

You can read all about IE8's progress and some more in-depth information about its feature-set at the MSDN IEBlog page.

If you like, you can download Beta 2 here to try it out.

We're excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!

You'll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here's an overview of what you'll find in IE8.

We focused our work 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).