Microsoft announced yesterday that the first beta version of its already popular Internet Explorer 8 would be launched in the first half of 2008. Recently, the new Web browser passed a key Web standard test and thus, became ready for launch.

IE8 passed the Acid2 Browser Test from the Web Standards Project, which means that the browser is able to render a Web site in the appropriate way. Microsoft seems to have been so proud of its new Internet tool that it also posted a video about the Internet Explorer passing the test on its Channel 9 Web site.

Microsoft originally developed its flagship Internet browser before Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) were released. So, because Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been used for so many years for surfing the Internet and people got accustomed to it, developers tend to write apps to work with IE rather than to support Web standards.

In this context, the software maker hasn’t been pressured to update its browser to meet the demands of Web standards, until Mozilla launched its open-source increasingly popular Firefow Web browser three years ago. So Microsoft created Internet Explorer 7, but because Web sites were created to work also with older versions of IE, they did not work properly on IE7.

Now, the company tries to remedy this problem, so that IE8 could be called a total success.