The next development milestones of the upcoming versions of Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1 Codename Shiretoko are virtually on the horizon. While Microsoft is hard at work on the successor of Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla has already moved onward following the release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17, 2008. In this regard, the Redmond company is cooking the second beta for IE8, currently planned for availability in August, while Mozilla is just starting to hammer away at Firefox 3.1 designed to bring to the table all the features, functionality and capabilities that have been cut from version 3.0 in order to make the mid-June deadline.

Having offered web content developers and designers IE8 Beta 1 in March, the Redmond giant is laboring to produce the subsequent Beta, a release aimed this time around at the general public. The IE team did not disclose whether IE8 Beta 2 will be a feature complete build, but did indicate that Beta 1 did not even come close to what the final version of the browser will bring to the table.

"IE8 is set for broad release in the third calendar quarter, which means real soon now," promised Bruce Kyle, Architect Evangelist with the US ISV Developer Evangelism Team. "There are several features for you. Most important is standards compatibility. You may see misaligned Web pages, overlapping text or images, JavaScript functionality and errors. The default mode for displaying pages in Internet Explorer 8 is "Standards mode." To fix this issue, Web site owners and administrators can add a meta-tag that tells Internet Explorer 8 to display an entire site or a specific page like Internet Explorer 7. That is, the meta-tag causes Internet Explorer to render pages in either Internet Explorer 7 Standards (Strict) mode or in Internet Explorer 5 (Quirks) mode, based on the Doctype element declaration."

After the release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla estimated that Firefox 3.1 Codename Shiretoko Alpha 1 would be made available either by the end of 2008, or in the first quarter of 2009. Currently, the plan is to code-freeze Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 on Monday July 21, and to deliver the fully fledged Alpha 1 build by the end of the month. Mozilla is looking to drop the first beta version of Firefox 3.1 Codename Shiretoko in August.

For the time being IE8 Beta 1 can be downloaded from here.
Firefox 2.0.0.16 and Firefox 3.0.1 are available for download here.