The IE Team has been conducting live chats every month since the first IE 8 Beta was released. As per news on the IE Blog, there will be one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009 and then a final release. Here is a compilation of some of the answers from the transcripts of the last two Chats that give a clue about what's coming -
- IE8 does not support different skins. However, you can create a custom version of IE8 using Internet Explorer Administration Kit. You can find out more about IEAK and different customizations it supports in this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/22/the-ie8-ieak.aspx
- We definitely want to implement opacity in the future. However, in order to do it right, so that it works across all elements, is smart about gamma, etc., we needed to spend a large effort, so it's not making it in to IE8.
- Beta 2 is considered feature-complete so we have no plans to add a large feature like download manager to IE8. IE8 does large file download and resumes downloads after lost connections to provide some of the value of a full download manager. and there are many third-party download managers you can use as well.
- In IE8 beta2 we don't delete cookies and temp files created by 3rd party extensions and activeX controls. That probably explains why you are seeing some things left behind.
- The bits we ship on Win7 vs. Vista vs. XP are virtually the same, but we do take advantage of specific features of each individual operating system.
- Viewing pages in compatibility mode is essentially the same as viewing it in IE7 as far as CSS is concerned. There are some slight JavaScript differences between Compat Mode and actual IE7 though.
- A typical release cycle includes beta and RC milestones prior to a RTM release.
- Performance in the browser is high priority for us. We will be working on improving performance in all parts of the browser, including JS execution and DOM manipulation, up until final release.
- Beta 2 is essentially feature complete. There are a number of IE add-ons that do a great job of spell checking. Please check out http://www.ieaddons.com