Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is scheduled to drop next month, with the final version of the successor of Internet Explorer 7 confirmed for availability by the end of 2008. In this regard, Microsoft is a tad late in terms of this year's browser releases, with rivals Opera and Mozilla having already made available new versions of their products. However, even in what has to be by now the eleventh hour, the Redmond company fails to disclose any deadlines, be they approximate or set in stone, for the delivery of both the upcoming development milestone of IE8 and the final version of the browser.

Microsoft is indeed talking IE8 Beta 2, in terms of features, functionality and added capabilities compared with Beta 1, released in March, and IE7, made available in October 2006, but the members of the IE team will simply not touch the subject of release dates. In mid July, during the company's monthly chat meeting with users, Cyra Richardson, Lead for Service Integration, refused to pinpoint the availability of IE8 Beta 2 past indicating August as the month of the launch.

Meanwhile, there is good news for end users, as Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect, has indicated that IE8 will simply fly and that the performance boost will start to be felt with the Beta 2 Build. "We've been spending a lot of our time focusing on performance, both in the Javascript engine and in the new layout engine. With Beta1, we hadn't done a lot of the deep performance tuning that we planned for release, so please do take beta 2 for a test drive when it's out," Wilson explained.

Andy Zeigler, Program Manager Reliability and Privacy, enumerated a collection of features that IE8 Beta 2 would bring to the table, and indicated that the release was just around the corner. At the same time, during his presentation at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2008, on July 24, Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business, revealed that IE8 final would drop by the end of 2008, which means that the browser is bound to evolve past the Beta stage and into the Release Candidate phase not long after Beta 2.

"Internet Explorer 8 is the product that we'll release to the Web later this year. We'll be in beta in a month or so from now. And as you look at it, think about it in the context of not only what it does for all of you as extensive Web users that depend on the browser, but also what it does for the ecosystem. With Internet Explorer 8, we've provided a very, simple, convenient way for them to take advantage and stay current," Veghte stated.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download here.