Friday, December 21, 2007

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft is developing Internet Explorer 8, and expects the first beta version to be released in the first half of 2008


Internet Explorer 8 in 2008
Microsoft is planning the release of the first beta of the next version of Internet Explorer in the first half of 2008. The corporation also said the Internet Explorer 8 has passed a key web standards test that ensures the browser won't "break" the web.

IE 8 has passed the "Acid2 Browser Test" from the Web Standards project. The test shows whether the browser renders a website in a certain way. If the browser displays the site correctly, it means the browser support certain accepted web standards.

Microsoft developed Internet Explorer before some web standards, such as CSS and RSS were developed, so older versions doesn't support some of the current standards. Since Internet Explorer was the de facto of web browsers, developers would often write web sites and codes to work with Internet Explorer, rather than to support the web standards. Microsoft also was lax in updating IE to meet the demands of web standards, since there was little competition in the browser market for years.

When Mozilla Firefox was released three years ago, the browser's need to stay current with web standards was once again moved to the forefront. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, and the company had good intentions - they decided to improve support for web standards with the new release.

However, some websites that were created for the older versions of IE didn't work properly on IE7. Microsoft hopes to remedy this problem so the situation is not repeated with IE8, according to an IE Blog posting attributed to Dean Hachamovitch, a Microsoft general manager on the IE team.

"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing Web," according to the blog posting.
Hachamovitch said Microsoft is taking a cue in lessons learned from making improvements to CSS in IE7 that "made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the Web as they were coded." The key design goal for IE8, he said, is compatibility with existing Web sites and Web standards supported in other browsers to provide a premium user experience.

"As a developer, I'd prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers," according to Hachamovitch's post. "Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work."

Microsoft said the final release of IE8 depends upon feedback received from the beta process.

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