Today, the Internet Explorer Team has made available Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for all to download. You can read the IE Team's announcement of the new release and very important milestone here from IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch on the IEBlog.

Download: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Also be sure to read this post from Program Manager Jane Maliouta on upgrading to IE8 Beta 2. It includes some very important information such as how to uninstall IE8 Beta 1 and more.

Internet Explorer 8 comes packed with new features designed to make browsing the web much easier and finding what you want much quicker. Matter of fact, based on my own experiences with IE8 these past few weeks, finding your "stuff" quicker is a very strong theme in IE8. I've discovered with IE8 that browsing the web is much more efficient. There are some brand new features in IE8 I'd like to call out, based on my own experiences that I think users will find very useful in browsing the web. I've found these features in IE8 so useful in fact that I am using IE8 Beta 2 on all my PCs.

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In the last video, Esther told you all about how Instant Search makes her day-to-day life easier. Today, she's going to talk to you about Live Icons, which makes searching even faster by letting you see a preview of the files you're searching for. If you're a visual person you'll especially appreciate seeing icons instead of file names or folders, and not having to open each file individually, which saves a ton of time.   

Video: Windows Vista Demo: Live Icons

We're announcing quite a few new languages available of the Windows Search 4.0 Preview today.

The following languages are available for download for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008:

• Arabic (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Chinese - Simplified
• Chinese - Traditional
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (There is no MUI pack for English)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian - Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

Please take note that the following languages are available on Windows XP/Windows Server 2003 only with an MUI pack:

• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Estonian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Romanian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Ukrainian

Got feedback on the Windows Search 4.0? We've got several places that you can go to leave your feedback:

• For general discussion with Windows Search engineers and team members you can head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For developer discussion, head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For general (no-reply) feedback on Windows Search, you can submit feedback here.

Overview

From my past posts about implementing your own Shell Namespace, there have been some great questions posted by readers.  Many of these stem from the fact that the Namespace example is fairly simple in that it does not implement all of the behavior that is possible in Explorer.  This was done to focus on the core steps in getting a working Namespace implemented.  Yet, there are a few extra steps you can take that don’t require too much more coding on your part to add more useful features.  One question in particular that comes up quite often is how to enable deep searching in your Namespace.

You will notice from the existing Namespace example that if you enter a search term in the search box in Explorer, the search only filters items that are currently in the view.  It does not search into the folders.  In the below images, we try to search for “Two” in the search box which only results in 1 item.  Thus, the sub folders were not included.

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