Breaking a long silence, Microsoft has finally started throwing light beams on its future version of “Internet Explorer 8”. The company says it has plans to launch a beta version of the Web browser for users sometime during the first half of 2008.

Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006.  There has been a lot of criticism of Microsoft that it has been too quiet about its future plans for the market-leading browser. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft ‘s General Manager for Internet Explorer, was also keeping mum in his blog for a long time until he wrote a post this month that revealed only that the next version would be called Internet Explorer 8.

Microsoft Chairman Bill gates had to mollify his concerns in an interview with bloggers last month, a transcript of which was posted online. He commented about the company’s openness about IE8. “I’ll have to ask Dean what the hell is going on. There’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.”

Web developers waiting eagerly for some refinements and improvements must be a little more satiated with this upcoming new arrival of the web browser.

Microsoft made an official announcement that IE8 is going to be a standards-compliant browser. The company says that its early build has already passed the Acid2 test, which measures how well a browser works with current Web standards.

Although various types of web standards are available these days and some of them are more accepted than others, Hachamovitch on his blog calls Acid2 a “good indication of being standards compliant. The end goal is interoperability”. Meaning thereby, If IE8 is standards-compliant, developers shouldn’t have to write one version of their Web sites and Web applications to work with Internet Explorer and others for Firefox, Safari, and Opera.  Web browsers, Firefox and Opera, for example, have already put forward their standards compliance.

Hachamovitch writes further in his blog that IE8’s standards compliance will not come at the cost of “breaking the existing Web”. IE7 included some significant changes to cascading style sheets that rendered some existing sites inoperable in IE7. Internet experts also hope that the renewed version, IE8, will have all such functional difficulties removed and users will find it more comfortable.

The new web browser also will apparently run in multiple modes, one of which is “standards mode.” Hachamovitch said this with much more expectations on Internet Explorer at the Microsoft’s Mix conference.