14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 8 is nothing more than an embryo buried deep and completely asphyxiated In Microsoft Utero. The next version of the Redmond company's proprietary browser has an unusually long germination period, and one that is almost completely mute. Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, did offer a small taste of IE8 at MIX07 in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas in May, but that was it. And that has been it for quite some time. In October, Microsoft celebrated the one-year anniversary since the launch of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Over a year since the launch of IE7, Microsoft is still dogfooding preview builds of IE8, and chances are slim that the company will actually breathe a word on the next version of the browser.
Forget about the Windows Omerta imposed by Steven codename Translucency Sinofsky. The fact of the matter is that the IE team has a few things to teach to the senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group - the user experience of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live services, on how to keep the momentum of a deafening silence. The one detail that is available at this time is the fact that Microsoft plans to make available IE8 within a two year time frame from the launch of IE7. This means that the browser could drop by the end of 2008, although there is also the possibility of slipping into early 2009.
In an interview with SitePoint, Wilson explained the silence surrounding IE8. "Well, one of the things that we wrestle with at Microsoft is pre-announcing - like, announcing before we're really, really confident that we can ship something with really high quality when we say we'll ship it. And because we're such a large company, because we ship to so many people-- And it's not-- When I say that I don't really mean "because we ship to so many end users," which we do, but we ship to so many corporations, and so many other businesses. Really, you know, we set the pace for a lot of other businesses," he stated.
Meanwhile, Mozilla is making headways with the development process of Firefox 3.0. The next version of the open source browser, codenamed Gran Paradiso is on the brink of taking the imminent leap out of Alpha stage and into Beta. Microsoft's silence on IE8 will do nothing but hurt the browser in relation to Firefox 3.0 that will already have a considerable advantage on the market. But the Redmond company is indeed building IE8. Wilson disclosed that the focus is currently placed on putting together the layout engine.
"When we ship a new version of Internet Explorer, a whole lot of companies have to go test their software against IE, they have to go, you know, figure out what kind of content their tools should be generating, and that sort of thing. And because we do that, because there are so many people who rely on us, we have to be very, very careful to be 100% confident when we announce things like "that's exactly what we're doing," or "that's the date that we are aiming for." When we don't, we tend to get a lot of people upset with us, of course, but it's not just them being upset with us; it's actually, it can be damaging their business model if they bet on us releasing something in a given timeframe, or bet on us releasing a given feature, and we don't ship it", Wilson added.