Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2
The standards compliance (or lack thereof) of Internet Explorer has always been a talking point and object of ridicule of the web community, and Microsoft has received its fair share of criticism regarding this important point. With Internet Explorer 7 (the first major update in many years), Microsoft started to put it all right with things like alpha PNG support, better CSS and tabs which users of other browsers had been enjoying for a long time.
With that release, Bill Gates himself came out to apologise for the lack of work on IE and promised a major update every 12-18 months from now on. A year has passed since that date and until recently, there was precious little news about Internet Explorer 8. However, the IEBlog recently posted up a little news item which put a nice smile on the faces of many people who had been ridiculing IE previously. Internet Explorer 8 now correctly renders the Acid2 test, the de facto test of compliance. Opera has supported it since version 8, as has Safari and Firefox as of version 3 (currently in beta).
This might not sound like anything groundbreaking, but putting it into the context of Microsoft’s previous allergy to standards and compliance, it really is something to talk about and the developers have to be congratulated for this step. Hopefully, it’ll be the first of many announcements in the same vein.