Internet Explorer 8 is nearing its next public development milestone at fast pace. Following the general availability of IE8 Beta 1 starting on March 5, 2008, the first day of MIX 2008, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, indicated the summer of this year as a potential release date for the next beta build. Now, Nick MacKechnie, Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand, has confirmed that Microsoft is actually targeting the third quarter of 2008 as the release date for Internet Explorer 8.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has been available for download for approximately three months now but it is a build aimed at developers. Microsoft's position has been that Beta 2 will be a variant of the browser tailored to the general consumers, and that it will have a feature set superior to that of Beta 1.
Microsoft made available a readiness toolkit for Internet Explorer 8 concomitantly with the release of Beta 1. The resources are designed to help web content designers and developers in making their websites play well with the next version of IE. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, IE8 is capable of seamlessly rendering content both in IE6 and IE7 mode, as well as in the standards-centric IE8 mode.
