Many of us web designers/developers never thought we’d witness Internet Explorer pass the Acid2 rendering test but Microsoft announced yesterday via IEBlog that their internal version of IE8 has done just that. Now if they could push this browser out sooner, it’d be great because the sooner IE6 gets ditched, the better.
For those that are unfamiliar with Acid2, it’s a browser rendering test that uses various browser features and web standards to display a smiley face. It’s hard to render correctly and doing so just means the browser supports a certain baseline of features and standards specifications. Even my preferred browser Firefox doesn’t quite render Acid2 correctly but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad browser.
Internet Explorer is notoriously horrible with standards support and there are numerous rendering bugs not seen in any other web browser. But this is a lot more transparent to the end user than it is to those working in web development like myself. I have to devote a significant amount of time and effort just dealing with IE6. IE7 is much improved but still not quite there yet. 99% of all browser compatibility issues that crop up in my work is related to Internet Explorer.
That fact that IE8 renders Acid2 correctly bodes well for the new release. Of course, not even a beta is available yet so we’ll just have to wait and see how IE8 turns out.
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