Microsoft: IE 8 Developers, Start Your Engines (
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Microsoft says a release candidate version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser is imminent and application developers ought to get ready. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, says Microsoft will soon release an RC version of the IE 8 browser with enhanced standards support, better tooling and other new features added since the Beta 2 release of the Web browser.Microsoft says a release candidate version of its Internet Explorer 8 Web browser
is imminent and developers ought to get ready for it.
In an interview with eWEEK, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet
Explorer for Microsoft, said, "If I had a bumper sticker in mind for this
it would say: 'Developers, start your engines.'"
Hachamovitch said Microsoft has been doing a lot of work since IE 8 Beta 2.
"To me a beta is all about listening, and we've done that and focused a
lot of work on putting the things we learned from developers into RC1 [Release
Candidate 1], and that's just around the corner," he said. "It's all
about developers. There's a sense of urgency about getting ready for the next
release. It's about helping developers understand how to sign off on their
sitesso they'll be ready when IE 8 RC comes out."
Even as the release candidate of IE 8 arrives, Microsoft will still be
testing the technology and listening to further feedback from developers to
figure out what else needs to be done to the browser before it is made
generally available as a finished product, Hachamovitch said.
Hachamovitch also said one of the unsung elements of IE 8 is the set of
built-in developer tools for the platform.
"IE has got these super powerful built-in developer tools; they come
with the browser, they're there," he said. "The developer tools in IE
8 were built for rapid iterationin the old days that was called trial and
error. So it's easy to identify what's in-memory."
A Microsoft blogger identified as "Shaan"
wrote in March: "The Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools also provide the
ability to experiment and iterate rapidly by letting you edit a site within IE.
For example, once you've found a style rule or property you're interested in,
click a checkbox to enable or disable it, or click an attributes in the DOM
[Document Object Model] tree to edit it in place."
Hachamovitch said the IE developer tools also include a script profiler to
make it easier for developers to identify and fix performance issues.
Application Development 
