Yesterday, many people were disappointed when Bill Gates mentioned that the version following IE7 would be called... IE8. Asa, Al, and many others (321 comments under that blog post) wanted Microsoft to tell us more about what's coming. Is the new version of the engine more standards-compliant? Will Microsoft finally address CSS and DOM compatibility? When will it be released? The IE blog has been silent over these important topics, upsetting the Web community.

Actually, many of us have missed the point, as Molly (who's contracting with Microsoft) had an interesting discussion with Bill Gates himself (who does not seem to know a lot anything about IE). Here is an excerpt of the transcript (emphasis mine[1]):

Molly: (...) I do realize that there is a new engine, there is some other information, and this information is not being made public — we are being asked not to talk about it.

So there will be a new engine for IE8. Is it an improvement of the (very) old Trident codebase? Is IE8 going to use the MS-Word rendering engine codebase like the one used in Outlook 2007 which, to say the least, got little support from the community. Some people say so... Wait and see! If you have ideas, information, educated guesses, clues, hopes or just feel you need to vent, just leave a comment here (an email adresses is requested, but not verified nor published, and comments are moderated).