With Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is laboring to balance its commitment to not breaking the web, namely to perpetuate compatibility with content that was designed specifically for IE7 and IE6, but also to embrace modern web standards to reach a level of support that will place IE on par with rival browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

The solution delivered by the Redmond company was the introduction of three rendering engines in Internet Explorer 8, one for modern standards, one for IE7-centric content, and the last for items that were tailored to IE6. Fact is that the next iteration of Internet Explorer will joggle with all rendering engines in order to accommodate websites and applications built not only for IE8, but also for previous versions of the browser.

“IE8 doesn't really break your website. What happens is, you're sending back content that is not very standards compliant. It worked in IE7 and IE7 wasn't the most standards compliant browser out there. So, for IE8 you just need to go and either use the IE7 rendering engine or go tweak the HTML in your page and make it work,” Microsoft's Pete LePage revealed.

“Another option is, if your website is external, and you've got a CSS and some rendering stuff for Firefox or Safari, try feeding that to Internet Explore 8, that may fix it as well.”

In order to ensure that IE7-based websites are fully compatible with IE8 with the minimum amount of effort, developers can simply add the following meta tag to pages: “X-UA-Compatible value="IE=EmulateIE7.” This is sufficient to tell Internet Explorer 8 to render a page with the engine of IE7. Of course, users also have the Compatibility View button available in IE8, making it easy for them to adapt the browser to the content they are surfing.

Microsoft is currently offering Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 to the general public, but the company has already provided IE8 Partner Build to a select pool of testers, and is laboring to produce the first Release Candidate of the browser, due in early 2009.

For the time being, Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2) is available for download here.