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The company says the second beta of the new browser will arrive this summer, and has issued a "call to action" to developers to make sure their websites will display properly when the beta is launched.

The problem stems, ironically, from Microsoft's new-found fondness for open standards. IE8 renders websites in Standards-Compliant mode by default, meaning that site that have been specifically tailored for previous versions of IE might not show properly.

"As such, we have provided a meta-tag

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usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7," Microsoft's senior technical account manager, Nick MacKechnie, in a in a blog post. "Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes."

"We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers," MacKechnie adds.

The first beta of IE8 has an "Emulate IE7" button, allowing users to effectively revert to the old browser on pages that don't render properly.

Microsoft makes it plea just as Mozilla nears its completion of Firefox 3. Mozilla will launch a second Release Candidate of Firefox 3 this week, with the browser due for a full launch before the end of the month.