Yesterday Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 2. It's likely the most anticipated release of the browser to date, for developers anyway. This is because they've done a lot to support CSS 2.1 and HTML 5 standards, which is everyone agrees is a good thing. It might not be perfect yet but they seem to be making good progress.

However if you're site isn't up to the latest standards they've implemented a featured called "Compatibility View":

Internet Explorer 8’s built-in Compatibility View button enables you to display websites that were designed for older browsers. Simply press the Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. It’s located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar.

For a more detailed review of the standards compliance take a look at Brad Neuberg's post over on Ajaxian.

Microsoft has published the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit which contains all the resources you'll need to get your site and add-ons working in IE8. If you're concerned primarily about Ajax in IE8 here are the pertinent bits for you:

* AJAX navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application, and could be used to get around a website without performing the traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components, such as the Address bar, by setting the value of window.location.hash, firing an event to alert components in the webpage, and even creating an entry in the travel log.
* DOM storage is a simple to use method for storing and retrieving strings of key-value pairs. Data can be stored per tab instance of a session or stored on the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine, reducing the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible, such as in combination with the new network connectivity event, to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer is offline.
* Connectivity events allow websites to check whether a user is connected to the network, and to get notified of connectivity changes.
* Six connections per host for broadband scenarios instead of two, and a scriptable property, improve performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8. This also increases functionality by ensuring that a request is not blocked to a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimize downloads based on a scriptable property.
* XMLHTTPRequest enhancements include a time-out property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.

Cross-domain communication is an integral part of AJAX development and mashup web applications. To help you build cross-domain communications that are safe and easy to implement, Internet Explorer 8 includes three features:

* With cross-domain request (XDR), developers can create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model and designed from the ground up with a “clean room” approach to further secure cross-domain data, this so-called XDomainRequest is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt into making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure that data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure, and fast. As recently announced, XDR will integrate with the Access Control framework from the W3C Web Applications Working group for cross-domain data that is “public,” that is, not user-specific.
* Cross-document messaging (XDM) APIs allow easy, secure, and standardized communication through IFrames between documents from different domains.
* Cross-domain security is further enhanced with a safe HTML sanitizer called toStaticHTML and the native toJSON and fromJSON APIs. By removing potentially harmful content from third parties, these parsing features go a long way in securing the end user. Both toStaticHTML and toJSON can be used with XDM, XDR and XHR, among other features in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2!

Is the browser situation getting better or worse? Looks like better to me, but I'm an optimist;)

Read more from Andre Charland.