It seems that rumors that we have been hearing for some time have been confirmed in the most unlikely of sources. A beta public of Internet Explorer 8 is due for the third quarter of this year, according to a Senior Technical Account Manager of Microsoft New Zealand.

While the IE 8 Beta that is currently available is branded as a developer only “preview” edition of the software, the next beta that will be released in the third quarter will be a general public beta targeted at a wide consumer audience.

The advance warning is said to be very public reminder to Web developers that changes could be needed to get their Web site to display properly with IE 8. In addition, Microsoft wants to start preparing consumers for the fact that in the default mode that pages will be rendered in “standards-compliant” mode, meaning that Web pages that were developed and targeted for IE 7 may not display or work properly on IE 8 in the default mode.

According to reports, Web developers can add a simple tag to let the browser know that the content should be displayed in IE 7 emulation mode. The magic behind this is not as complex as it might seem, since all it really does is set the X-UA-Compatible property to IE=EmulateIE7. This is possible due to the XML based flexibility offered by custom header processing.

While some are eager to get their hands on the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 because of some of the promised new features that it will deliver, it is likely (according to reports as well as our sources) to be the last version of Internet Explorer that Microsoft will deliver. With all of the options that are available in the Web browser market, it does seem that it is not as necessary as it has been in the past for Microsoft to continue to develop and enhance Internet Explorer.