Microsoft Drops Hints About IE 8

Microsoft has hinted that it will continue to prioritise security and ease of use in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and will seek to improve Web development with current standards compatibility.

“The priorities Microsoft set for IE 7 are the same for IE 8: strong security, ease of use and Web development improvements,” stated Chris Wilson, IE platform architect, at Microsoft’s Mix ’07 conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft will invest more in layout and adhering to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 specifications. It also intends to make its browser object model more interoperable to make it easier to work with other browsers and allow more flexible programming patterns.

“The Ajax Web programming style needs more client-side application programming interfaces to allow developers to create more powerful applications,” opined Wilson.

“There’s work in the standardisation bodies to do local storage and get better security models. Microsoft is working with the W3C on standardising HTML version 5 and XHTML version 1 and 1.1” added Wilson.

Wilson also mentioned that adherence to standards is increasingly important to Web site developers but Microsoft is in a challenging position as it introduces more standards compliance.