Microsoft IE 8 Beta 2 Coming! Are your websites ready?
Hi All,
Ensuring your website is ready for Internet Explorer 8
Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.
However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.
We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers. To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120024 .
Additional Resources
The following links provide additional information you may find useful:
· Internet Explorer 8 main site: http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8
· Internet Explorer Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie
· Internet Explorer Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
· Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit (for web designers and developers): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/default.htm
· Microsoft Interoperability Principles: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx
Nick.
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 is expected to be released in the third quarter of 2008, which is between 1 July and 30 September, says Microsoft employee Nick MacKechnie in a blog written and posted yesterday. The beta will be aimed at end-users, whereas beta 1 was aimed at web developers.

The long awaited browser is said to comply with HTML and CSS standards. These are codes that are used to create the appearance and structure of a web page. Internet Explorer is notorious for not complying with these standards, so this release is expected to be an important release in its history. In beta 1, many websites have failed to display in the "IE8 standards mode," but many bug reports have been submitted to Microsoft regarding this issue, so rendering may improve.

The beta 2 release is expected to improve its standards compliant mode even more as well as adding a more customisable graphical user interface that is expected to be similar to Microsoft Office 2007. This is the first version of Internet Explorer that will have this customisable interface.

The final version of Internet Explorer 8 is expected at the end of the year.