What is next for Internet Explorer?
Microsoft drops hints about Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)
We don’t know all that much about IE8 (Internet Explorer version 8) just yet, but here is what we do know:
Wilson said to expect Microsoft to be investing across layout, object model and Ajax development fronts in IE 8.0. Specificially, Wilson said Microsoft is investing in making IE 8.0 more compliant with CSS 2.1 layout standards. Microsoft also is working to make the IE 8.0 object model more interoperable with that used by other browsers, and is looking to provide more client-side application programming interfaces (APIs) to support local storage for mash-ups, Wilson said.
Microsoft is planning to make tweaks to IE that will allow developers to more easily add extensions to its browser, Wilson said. He said Microsoft acknowledged that extensions are powerful but potentially “scary.â€
I still strongly believe that Microsoft’s “killer†feature would be the addition of Extensions/Plugins like Firefox currently offers. I understand the security implications of allowing 3rd party developers to create add-ons for a web browser that is still so mistakenly and idiotically baked into the OS. A possible solutions would be to have some kind of submission process where developers submit newly created add-ons which are briefly looked over by Microsoft (or some open source group) to quickly verifying that their isn’t any glaringly obvious problems. Better yet, if Microsoft could some how figure out a magic way of allowing Firefox extensions to run correctly on IE8…that would be even more “killerâ€. In my opinion the key features I need to see would be at minimum full CSS 2.1 support, and ideally a fair moderate chunk of CSS 3 support as well. I’d imagine that X/HTML 2 and HTML 5 support are pretty much assumed, but I will specially point those out as being required as well. IE8 is Microsoft’s first real attempt to launch itself back into the forefront of web browsers. IE6 was revolutionary when it first came out…many many years ago. When IE7 was released, it was nothing more than attempt to catch up to the current big boys of Firefox and Opera (they failed to catch up by the way). So that makes IE8 Microsoft’s first real opportunity to create something revolutionary once again. Only time will tell.
Despite continued criticism over the slow development of IE 7, it is clear that Microsoft isn’t ignoring the browser any more. A timeline for the release of IE 8 isn’t available yet, but Microsoft is hinting that there will be at least another year of development, which would make it approximately 18 months after the release of IE 7.
So…according to this tentative schedule, expect IE8 to be available sometime in 2008. They initially said 1 year development cycles, which then turned into 12-15 months, which is now 18 months. Lets just hope this isn’t another Longhorn…
Wandering the Interwebs 