Ionic 2 Beta 8 introduces significant updates, including bug fixes and breaking API changes, alongside new components like Popover and Range, which enhance user interaction by providing a dialog box for overflow actions and a customizable slider for selecting values. The release also advances support for Progressive Web Apps by optimizing Ionic 2 for cross-platform deployment and implementing changes such as renaming custom decorators and lifecycle events to prevent conflicts with native HTML events. As the team prepares for a release candidate, they focus on performance improvements and refining existing components, inviting community contributions to further enhance the framework.