What's Internet Explorer 8 all about?

Microsoft 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, according to the company.

At Microsoft's Mix '07 conference in Las Vegas this week, IE platform architect Chris Wilson recapped the software behemoth's development priorities in the making of IE 7 and outlined some of its goals for the next version of its browser.

Wilson said Redmond intends to create a follow-on version, IE 8, within two years of IE 7's release - which came out in October.

The priorities Microsoft set for IE 7, Wilson said, are the same for IE 8: strong security, ease of use and web development improvements. "It's clear we have a lot to do with the web developer platform," he said, addressing an audience of mostly web developers at Mix '07.

Specifically, he said Microsoft will invest more in layout and adhering to the Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 specifications. He also said Microsoft wants to make its browser object model more interoperable "to make it easier to work with other browsers and allow more flexible programming patterns".

In addition, he said the Ajax web programming style needs more client-side application programming interfaces to allow developers to create more powerful applications.

Wilson said: "There's work in the standardisation bodies to do local storage and get better security models," adding that Microsoft is working with the W3C on standardising HTML version 5 and XHTML version 1 and 1.1.

He said adherence to standards is increasingly important to website developers but Microsoft is in a "challenging" position as it introduces more standards compliance.

Because previous versions of Internet Explorer strayed from standards, new versions, such as IE 7, have caused problems with some websites not working for end users, he said.

Wilson added: "Web development compatibility is really crucial for building applications and... for us to deploy browsers but it has to be an evolutionary step," noting that half a billion people use some version of Internet Explorer. "If we say, 'here is your new browser - it's standards compatible' we actually disrupt the existing ecosystem and it doesn't actually make it better for anyone."

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com