A little hope for the future – Internet Explorer 8

March 4th, 2008 | by Sean |

Cheers to Microsoft for IE 8!

An unusual thing for me to say, to be sure. Those of you who know me best have likely been the victim of my railing against Internet Explorer, Microsoft, and all things silly between the two in my profanity-laced description of how web design actually works (this comic describes it fairly well).

Then Microsoft came around, announced IE 8 would pass the Acid 2 browser test and many cheers were heard the world over. “Oh, but wait!” say some, who read more deeply into the announcement. You had to request specifically, that IE 8 use its improved standards-compliance mode; it wouldn’t use it by default on well-formed documents (see here and here). More than a few web developers thought that was silly, myself included.

Microsoft has reversed it’s previous decision! In a recent blog post, Dean Hachamovitch, GM for Internet Explorer, announced that IE 8 would use its new more-compliant Standards mode on well-formed pages. Web developers who want IE 6 or IE 7-compatible rendering modes would have to specifically request that of IE 8.

So, kudos to Microsoft and its IE team. Thank you for supporting web standards!

  1. One Response to “A little hope for the future – Internet Explorer 8”

  2. By pellis on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply

    Oh, god. Hell hath frozen over and the pigs are flying into airplane engines as we speak.

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