Internet Explorer 8 is nearing its next public development milestone at fast pace. Following the general availability of IE8 Beta 1 starting on March 5, 2008, the first day of MIX 2008, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, indicated the summer of this year as a potential release date for the next beta build. Now, Nick MacKechnie, Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand, has confirmed that Microsoft is actually targeting the third quarter of 2008 as the release date for Internet Explorer 8.

"We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers," MacKechnie stated. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has been available for download for approximately three months now but it is a build aimed at developers. Microsoft's position has been that Beta 2 will be a variant of the browser tailored to the general consumers, and that it will have a feature set superior to that of Beta 1.

"Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of 'write once, run anywhere,' freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases," MacKechnie added.

Microsoft made available a readiness toolkit for Internet Explorer 8 concomitantly with the release of Beta 1. The resources are designed to help web content designers and developers in making their websites play well with the next version of IE. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, IE8 is capable of seamlessly rendering content both in IE6 and IE7 mode, as well as in the standards-centric IE8 mode.

IE8 Beta 1 is available for download here.