Most of the focus on Microsoft at MIX ‘07 in Las Vegas was about their Silverlight platform, which will be used to develop Flash-like web applications. However, Microsoft dropped the ball about IE 8 being the browser that will provide the user interface for this upcoming technology, and offered some hints about what else we can expect from the next adaptation in the series of Internet Explorer applications.
High priority items are improvements in RSS, CSS and AJAX support. In addition, it is widely rumored that microformats will be supported in IE 8. Microformats are small tags embedded in HTML code that can be read by software for a variety of purposes, such as calendar appointments and contact information. Also, IE 8 is likely to include a myriad of options for customization, which has been a big criticism against IE 7.
When can we expect to see Internet Explorer 8? There is no official timeline available yet, but reports say that Microsoft is hinting that it needs at least one more year of development, which if realistic would make the IE 8 release come 18 months after the release of IE 7; although knowing Microsoft it will probably be closer to two years.
I welcome the release of a new IE browser, because frankly, IE 7 is plain garbage. I continue to use IE 6 on Windows when forced to use Internet Explorer by certain web sites and will never upgrade it to IE 7. Firefox is my browser of choice, followed by Safari, and Microsoft needs to release a browser that doesn’t think it’s special and actually conforms to web standards before I think of changing my default browser back to IE.