Microsoft has already launched the Internet Explorer 8 beta version, the browser meant to replace IE 7 and to continue the battle for supremacy with Firefox 3.0, recently released in final version. Microsoft promised a load of improvements, such as CSS 2.1 support, CSS Certification, performance, HTML 5 support, new developer tools, activities, Web slices and another unnamed feature.

The new browser will include significant security upgrades, such as the SmartScreen Filter, an upgraded version of the phishing filter found in Internet Explorer 7; a set of cross-site scripting defenses to protect the browser against the so-called "reflection" attacks; a number of anti-social engineering features; improvements to ActiveX dialogues and control, and more.

Internet Explorer 8.0 includes three rendering modes: one that is using the current web standards, a second one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and a third one based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. By default, the first mode of rendering will be enabled in Internet Explorer.

In the early phases of the development of Internet Explorer, Microsoft intended to make the second one (IE 7 mode) the default mode in the browser, claiming that it would offer a better backwards-compatibility with existing Web sites and applications.

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.