Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta Due This SummerMicrosoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta Due This Summer

After a long silence, Microsoft is finally shedding some light on Internet Explorer 8. The company says it plans to have a beta version of the Web browser available during the first half of 2008.

Microsoft has come under some recent criticism that it has been too quiet about its future plans for the market-leading browser. Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006. The blog of Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft general manager for Internet Explorer, was silent from then until a post this month that revealed only that the next version would be called Internet Explorer 8.

In an interview with bloggers last month, a transcript of which was posted online, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates had to mollify concerns about the company's openness about IE8. "I'll have to ask Dean what the hell is going on," he's quoted as saying. "There's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE."

Web developers clamoring for more should be a little more satiated this time around. Microsoft announced Wednesday that IE8 is going to be a standards-compliant browser. The company says an early build has already passed the Acid2 test, which measures how well a browser works with current Web standards.

Though there are many different Web standards, some of which are more accepted than others, Hachamovitch on his blog calls Acid2 a "good indication of being standards compliant." The end goal, he writes, is interoperability. If IE8 is standards-compliant, developers shouldn't have to write one version of their Web sites and Web apps to work with Internet Explorer and others for Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Firefox and Opera, for example, already claim standards compliance.

Hachamovitch writes that IE8's standards compliance won't come at the cost of "breaking the existing Web." IE7 included some significant changes to cascading style sheets that rendered some existing sites inoperable in IE7.

The browser also will apparently run in multiple modes, one of which is "standards mode." Hachamovitch says to expect more on Internet Explorer at Microsoft's Mix conference in March.