Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test 20 Dec 2007

Earlier this month, we were all criticising Microsoft for the lack of transparency around the development of Internet Explorer 8.0. These criticisms prompted Molly Holzschlag to ask Bill Gates why communication from the IE team hadn't been forthcoming, to which he replied "I'll have to ask...what the hell is going on...There's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE". While this seemed like a mere platitude at the time, it seems that the head honcho actually followed through, because the IE team made a massive announcement yesterday. From IEblog:

"I'm delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we're committed to for this release."

If you are wondering what this means in English, allow us to explain...Acid2 is a test case designed by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools. Browsers that pass this test follow the W3C's HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications correctly, while those that don't...er...don't (and, more importantly, hold up web developers who usually have to employ complicated workarounds to support these products and can't use the latest features incorporated by the two standards). The fact that IE8 passes this test, means that it is therefore highly standards compliant - it is on a par with competitors like Opera, iCab, Konqueror and Safari, and ahead of Firefox and Camino (for the time being, at least). Hooray!

(Note: This announcement makes Opera's complaint about Internet Explorer's lack of standards support seem a tad embarrassing, doesn't it?)

As for the communications breakdown, IEBlog has this to say:

"For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We're posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we're confident about delivering it in the final product. We're listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we've run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we're excited to be able to share definitive information."

Sounds like a sensible approach.