Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 browser will enter soon its public beta development phase, ActiveWin.com reports. The site obtained an internal e-mail from Microsoft which invites selected participants to join the technical beta program for Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

The final version of Microsoft's next generation browser will be released in the first half of 2008. In December, 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 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 Firefox 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.

Meanwhile, Mozilla Corp. recently announced the release of a beta version of Firefox 3, bringing new features and enhanced performance to what already was a successful browser, with an increasing popularity and often preferred to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.