IE8 News

From Mix 08 in Las Vegas, we have some fresh news about the upcoming Web brwser from Microsoft, and I am talking about Internet Explorer 8, of course. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson shared some interesting views of the whole thing, and I think you should also know about this, so here we go...


In a discussion with BetaNews, Wilson said "IE7 was the start to IE8," but what is this supposed to mean, in detail? If we look back, one hint could be the fact that IE6 was left behind, and the development team in charge with IE7 was a complately new one, and this can be noticed by comparing those two browsers, but the problem is that IE7 didn't manage to keep the market share IE6 had, but lose some of it, especially to Firefox.

Obviously, IE8 is intended to gain back a part of what's lost, but can Microsoft reach this goal? As usual, we know that IE8 is going to have better support for Web standards, and Wilson said the JavaScript engine has been rewritten from scratch, having only speed in mind, and they also changed the default simultaneous connections number, up to 6, from only 2, previously.

Unfortunately, for now we can't talk about a Beta release for the public, and Beta 2 is expected to arrive this summer, with more user-oriented features. With this timeline in sight, I can't help but wonder - will Microsoft be able to release a browser able to match Firefox 3 and Opera 9.50? As usual, that's the part we need to see in the future, but my guess is that IE8 will still be one step ahead of its competitors...