You know what "soon" for Microsoft means. Anyway, tough in the competition with Firefox, sure IE8 should boast some hot features. So far of whar we know is, IE 8 will pass the ACID 2 compatibility test and include support for a controversial “version tag” which will allow web developers to force the browser into “super-standards” mode. And if you read more, you'll know what does that all mean

The basic idea is that website developers will be able to add a meta tag to their pages telling IE how it should render the page — in traditional mode (non-standard IE 6-style rendering), standards mode (IE 7’s half-baked concept of standards) and super standards mode (where IE will render similar to the way Firefox and Opera have been doing for the last five years). And this versioning concept clearly brings in a bad mood for developers as they need to remake things on their website for IE8 super standards mode.

Although IE 7 usage has climbed since its release, much of it may well be driven by the release of Windows Vista (which bundles IE 7). Since IE 8 won't have an OS upgrade to piggyback on, without compelling new features many users may not even bother upgrading.