At the Mix'07 conference, Microsoft employees discussed the future for Internet Explorer and what might be expected from IE 8:

While details may be lacking, the structure of the conferences planned for Mix'07 gives a few hints. Improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support are all being given high priority. It is also widely speculated that IE 8 will include support for microformats, small tags embedded in HTML code that can be interpreted in various ways by software, such as calendar events or contact information. Microformat support is scheduled for Firefox 3, so IE 8 will have to include them in order to keep up. The new version may also include more options for user interface customization, as that was one of the biggest criticisms of IE 7, and one which the developers often blamed on lack of time.

The fact that there will be an IE 8 at all is a testament to the fact that the web browser market has become competitive again. When IE 6 finally vanquished Netscape, the team that created Microsoft's browser was largely thrown to the winds, and development slowed to a crawl. It took Firefox gaining a ten percent market share to cause Microsoft to respond with IE 7.

Despite continued criticism over the slow development of IE 7, it is clear that Microsoft isn't ignoring the browser any more. A timeline for the release of IE 8 isn't available yet, but Microsoft is hinting that there will be at least another year of development, which would make it approximately 18 months after the release of IE 7. Microsoft isn't currently planning any interim releases, such as 7.1 or 7.5, but the browser does continue to be updated with bugfixes and security patches through Windows Update.