Last week Microsoft announced that IE8 beta passed the Acid2 test – a test to determine how well a web browser displays with several different web standards.
After the lack of effort of IE7 regarding standards compliance, interoperability and backwards compatibility, instead of much excitement from web developers it is unfortunately more a largely “hesitant” sigh of “about time” and “is it for real?”.
Chris Wilson, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer platform architect, has had a bit of a dilemma on his hands it seems. He’s had developers pleading with him to make IE standards compliant, yet his bosses are telling him “Don’t break the Web” by improving IE so that existing websites with previous IE browser versions no longer work with it. “Improved standards support by default means that web pages will break,” Microsoft was quoted as saying.
With this beta version of IE8 due out in mid 2008 it’s a fast migration from the IE7 browser released in 2006 (there being a period of 5 years from IE 6 to the release of IE7). So why the fast pace to release a beta of IE 8 is a question many wonder?
Could it be due to with a small browser known as Opera currently suing Microsoft on grounds of Microsoft creating an unfair monopoly in the market by bundling IE with their windows operating system and failing to support web standards?
Or is it that after the release of IE7, user feedback and critics howled they did nothing to please those looking for a commitment to standards compliancy, and Microsoft is merely keen to make amends and provide what people want? Considering Microsoft originally intended to to add compliance support to IE7 but it didn’t make the shipping build it and was then delegated to the bottom of a large list of improvements for future updates.
There is of course much more to the concept of creating a good browser than rendering well in the Acid2 test, Microsoft has promised there won’t be the difficulties IE7 has had due to marked improvements of IE7’s cascading style sheets (CSS) so maybe we can believe Microsoft is more serious this time round with their efforts towards standards compliancy and interoperability. Current IE7 may be way ahead of IE6, but Firefox and Safari still run circles around IE7 for web standards compliance.
Good luck to Microsoft with their efforts (albeit a bit late) to make amends with their upcoming IE8 beta release – whatever their ulterior motives may be – after all if they can get their act together, it is the developers and clients that will win saving a lot of time and money in development and interoperability costs .
Thoughts, comments?
Cheers until next time
Pru