For the past year, Microsoft has been hard at work building Internet Explorer 8. Following the release of Internet Explorer 7, back in October 2006, for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003, the company shifted its attention on Vista and Vista SP1, but with IE8 in the focus of the IE team. IE8 was taken out of the background and brought into the limelight by Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates. But Gates only provided a small catalyst, the heavyweight details came courtesy of the IE General Manager, Dean Hachamovitch.

First off, Hachamovitch managed to tell the world what it had already known, that IE8 was designed to succeed IE7. But then the GM produced an excellent strategic move aimed at wooing web developers. Hachamovitch presented screenshots of the evolution of Internet Explorer 8. In all fairness, the growth of IE8 is not covered throughout 2007, instead the presentation is limited to August, September, October, November and December. You will be able to find these screenshots integrate at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Channel 9. The images depict the way IE8 dealt with the "Acid2 Face" standards test in various development milestones, across five months, with the last test taken on December 12th. Testing builds of IE8 are available exclusively and internally at Microsoft, with the first public beta of the browser planned by mid 2008.

"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier", Hachamovitch explained.