News

IE 8 Beta 2 Coming 'Third Quarter'

Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand Nick MacKechnie posted on his MSDN blog that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is coming in the "third quarter" of this year.

On Monday Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand Nick MacKechnie posted on his MSDN blog that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is coming in the "third quarter" of this year.

Microsoft has previously said that the next beta for IE 8 would come "this summer." Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 1 in March at its Mix conference; it's available for public download here. Microsoft has not announced when the final version of IE 8 will be released.

There's not much detail about Beta 2 in MacKechnie's post, titled "Microsoft IE 8 Beta 2 Coming! Are your Web sites ready?" In fact, he points readers to this help document for Beta 1 for information on getting sites ready. However, at least the post appears to confirm that Microsoft will not backtrack again from its decision announced in March to have IE 8 conform to Web standards.

"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," MacKechnie wrote in part. "Browsing with [IE 8] may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8."

MacKechnie also points developers to Microsoft IE 8 Beta 1 readiness toolkit.

Redmond has yet to make any mention of Beta 2 on its official IE 8 site.

About the Author

Becky Nagel serves as vice president of AI for 1105 Media specializing in developing media, events and training for companies around AI and generative AI technology. She also regularly writes and reports on AI news, and is the founding editor of PureAI.com. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Users" and other popular AI resources with a real-world business perspective. She regularly speaks, writes and develops content around AI, generative AI and other business tech. She has a background in Web technology and B2B enterprise technology journalism.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On with GitHub Copilot App Technical Preview: Turning a Blazor Issue into a PR

    GitHub's brand-new Copilot desktop app, in technical preview, handled a small Blazor issue from planning through pull request creation, but the hands-on test also showed why developers still need to verify agent work in the running app before merging.

  • At Build 2026, Microsoft Sets Up Windows as an OS for AI Agents

    Microsoft's Build 2026 Windows developer announcements point to a broader platform strategy for agentic AI, spanning terminal workflows, local models, app-building skills, Cloud PCs and operating system-level containment.

  • Slammed by Copilot Usage-Based Billing on Day 1, Facing $180 Bill for June

    A journalist using GitHub Copilot Pro details how a broken editorial workflow on day one of usage-based billing led to runaway token consumption, a projected $180 monthly bill, and practical tactics for cutting AI credit burn.

  • AdaBoost.R2 Regression Using C#

    AdaBoost.R2 regression works by building an ensemble of decision trees, training them on reweighted data, and combining their predictions with a weighted median, while also showing how parameter choices affect accuracy and overfitting.

Subscribe on YouTube