Mozilla Foundation just launched Firefox 3 Beta 2, the second beta candidate of the third iteration of its popular web browser. It will likely release the final version of Firefox 3 within a month.
On the other side of the field stands browser industry leader Microsoft, whose current offering is Internet Explorer 7, released in October of last year. IE7 represented a marked improvement for the Internet Explorer series, adding features like tabbed browsing and shoring up security. However, faced with a hungry new 'Fox, Microsoft is hard at work preparing the next iteration of its IE line.
Now major news is coming from Microsoft as it speaks publicly for the first time about IE8 on its development blog. It says the first beta candidate would be delivered in the first half of 2008. Microsoft has announced that it will focus its efforts on multi-platform support and compatibility. It also says it will fix the Cascading Style-Sheet (CSS) issues that crept up due to improvements to CSS in the IE7 release.
The development team for IE8 is already trumpeting a major milestone -- the browser in standard mode survived the "Acid2 Browser Test" which is a well respected test for web standards compatibility. The development team acknowledges that Acid2 is not an official standards test, but is a good example of the browser's growing maturity.
The Microsoft Development team is headed by Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for the Internet Explorer team. He explained the reasoning behind the team's silence until this point, stating, "We're posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we're confident about delivering it in the final product. We're listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly."
Microsoft has recently traded jabs with Mozilla and has found itself the target of antitrust allegations from Opera. Its continuing prosperity is very much dependent on the success of IE8 and its no small surprise that with the impending release of Firefox 3, Microsoft is finally going public with its progress.
Fonte: DailyTech
