Drupal 8 isn’t just mobile friendly: It’s mobile first. In Drupal 8, all built-in themes are responsive, and even administration pages are a snap to use on mobile devices. Tables shrink properly, and the new admin toolbar is mobile from the start. The new administration experience features a lightweight, mobile-first Back to site button that leads back to the last frontend page.

Multilingual Capabilities

When it comes to deploying a web presence for a global audience, Drupal 8 speaks your language (whatever it is). With Drupal 8 you can:
  • Translate anything in the system with built-in user interfaces.
  • Build pages with Views language filtering and block visibility.
  • Get software translation updates automatically from the Drupal community.
From the first installation screen all the way to translating views and image fields, the entire experience is made simpler.

Configuration Management

Configuration management keeps track of all the important details as content is configured and revised. Drupal 8 comes with a file system-based configuration management system, which makes it simple to transport configuration changes such as new content types, fields, or views from development to production. It even lets you use version control for your configuration. Keep your config data in files, separate from production data in the database. It’s the way configuration management was meant to be.

Accessibility

Drupal 8 has added extensive support for standard accessibility technologies including WAI-ARIA and have been working to provide more semantic HTML5. With the ARIA Live Announcements API and TabManager, Drupal 8 provides centralized control for rich Internet applications. Many small improvements have been made in color contrast, and font sizes, and the system will leverage jQuery UI's autocomplete and modal dialogs. Views is now in Core; both the output and Views UI are now much more accessible. To provide visitors with an optimal experience, site admins can also require entry of alternative text for all images.

Built-in Web Services

Build mobile apps with Drupal as the data source, or even post back to Drupal from the client. Drupal 8 implements state-of-the-art Hypertext Application Language (HAL) as well. Do you want to expose content as JSON or XML, authenticate a client with HTTP authentication, or expose views-generated lists as services? You can do all that and more. The possibilities are endless.

Effortless Authoring

With the new editor functionality and bundled CKEditor WYSIWYG editor, it has never been easier to edit content in Drupal. The new user interface features two columns so you can concentrate on what is important. Drupal 8 features:
  • In-place editing of content without having to use the full edit form.
  • WYSIWYG configuration made easy with web security in mind.
  • Draft saving made easier.
Deploy content where you want it, the way you want it to look.

Fun and Fast Theming

Drupal 8 includes the flexible, fast, and secure template engine for PHP called Twig. With Twig, templates are now written an easy-to-learn syntax which brings several simplifications and greater security. Twig makes designing beautiful and functional Drupal sites easier than ever before.

Views

Views has long been a very popular Drupal add-on module that allows non developers to create lists, posts, galleries, tables, maps, graphs, menu items, blocks, reports, forum posts and more. With Drupal 8, Views is now built into the core CMS and it is deeply integrated. The front page listing is now a view, as are several administration pages. What does this mean for you? It means you can now easily customize the front page, listing blocks, and more. It also means you can simply create custom admin pages, customize filters and actions.

Industry Standard Approach

The new release features much more modern, object-oriented code (classes, inheritance, interfaces, etc.) and embraced the latest PHP standards
 (e.g. PSR-0, namespaces, traits). It also leverages many “best of breed” external libraries: Composer, PHPUnit, Guzzle, Zend Feed Component, Assetic and more. Drupal is no longer on an island.

More Field Power

Drupal 8 extends the signature content structuring system by including more field types in core, and lets you attach fields to more types of content. New types include entity reference, link, date, e-mail, telephone, etc. Comments are now a field and, for example, you can now take comments on products. You can also attach fields to forms to create custom contact forms.

Better Markup with HTML5

HTML5 plays a key role in making websites fully functional and compatible with mobile screens. This industry standard is now included in Drupal 8 and means Drupal now has proper native input tools on mobile for fields like date, e-mail, and phone.

Credit and courtesy: https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0/features