Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Today Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch posted about an important milestone in the

IE Team Announces IE8 Milestones (Acid2 Tests Passed!)

...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode .

Well its about time you posted something about IE8!

Sincerly, congrats on passing the Acid Test2! This does mean a lot to us developers.

Now, with the glory, also comes the pain.  This post indicates:

"We’re listening to the feedback about IE"

For those of us following this blog for over a year, know this is complete BS. (hate to use this tone, but lets be honest)

MS Can't possibly be listening to our feedback about IE, because there is no avenue for us to SEND FEEDBACK, thus no way for you to RECEIVE FEEDBACK.

xSofties Al and Dave have been extremely vocal in how disappointing MS has been in shutting down IE Feedback at the CRITICAL moment when it was so desperately needed.

Even Chris has posted (on his blog I believe) that such a tool is needed, although it wasn't his or his direct teams responsibility).

Lets be very open about this, PUBLIC BUG TRACKING is a tool that YOU need, as much as WE need.

I have several bugs (that I have not seen reported anywhere on the Net) that I would love to file, but there is no way to do so, and track it.  When you tell me where the site is, that I can submit these bugs, then I will do so, but only if I and others can track them.

Finally, this time when you open up your public bug tracking, we want written confirmation that you are not tearing it down.  We were extremely annoyed when dozens of hours of OUR time went into filing reports, test cases, and confirming  bugs, only to see the site disappear.  We won't be fooled again on this, you've CRIED WOLF once already.

Welcome back to the dialogue!

This is great news.

@About Time, thanks for the feedback.  See, we are listening.  :)

Seriously, though, the point is that we have been out there listening to web developers and designers and what they need, at conferences and forums as well as reading the comments on our blog.

Thats great. I just made the test with Firefox and it failed.

This is awesome news, guys. Beautiful job.

I love the new "we'll disclose stuff when we have working code and know we can deliver" policy, by the way.

Let's keep it simple: congratulations!

It's great to finally see some actual news about the next version of Internet Explorer.  Hopefully, this is just the start of IE's trend towards open standards compliance.  As stated in the post, this is just a single test case, but it is surely a sign of progress and probably a significant internal milestone.

I look forward to seeing continued progress but still do not understand the unwillingness to talk more openly about anticipated features.  I feel the development community would appreciate more transparency here even if the IE team is unable to deliver 100% on their goals.  It would be more reassuring to hear about the teams expectations for the next release than to hear about improvements only once such milestones have been reached.

I look forward to your next IE8 post and what other surprises you may have in store (as seeing that yellow smiley face at the top of your post was most certainly unexpected).

Ya,just keep it up.... SVG and more... maybe even a .NET 3.5 GUI

Excellent. The hate I've felt all these years is dimming from a bright burning sun to the dull tickle of an annoyance.

A totally kewl announcement that I am sure coders everywhere will welcome!

Way to go guys on such a huge step in adopting Web Standards.

Ping back: http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/12/microsoft-internet-explorer-8-passes.html

Philip Elder

MPECS Inc.

Oh, and IE NEEDs Pipelining with up to 8+ network connections at one time.

Will IE8 pass ACID2 test if we change the default Font from Times New Roman to Cambria?

I tried changing the default font to Cambria on Firefox 3 Beta and Opera browsers.

Firefox 3 renders it a bit off and incorrect.

Opera seems to be rendering it properly.

Now, add the usability functions that would make me switch from FF:

1. Inline spell check. Please please please

2. Live bookmarks toolbars. This is the best way to view your favorite few RSS feeds.

3. the inline search bar from F is very good. The ctrl-F function from IE is out-dated.

4. The interagted search bar in FF has many advatages of the one in IE.

5. When typing an address, the autofill only shows the URL. That's sometimes useles.. It would be nice to see the Page Title, URL, and favicon.

Great!

Now fix the Operation Aborted JS DOM error!

Now THIS is good news, and it's very nice of you to tell us Dean.

Even though I do sincerely think it would've been better for everyone (for you from a PR standpoint and for us developers from a "what does tomorrow hold for me" point of view) if you'd done what the Webkit team did a few months/years back when they were pushing for ACID2 themselves: regularly blog on the progress, showing the smiley face and everything, tell us what was updated, maybe why you'd focused on that particular feature that time (if there was a specific reason), etc...

And since you're speaking of milestones for standard supports and interoperability, would it be possible for us to get a glimpse of these milestones? Maybe a tentative roadmap with both a few internal goals and some external onces (planned releases of public alphas/betas maybe, stuff like that)

Anyway thanks a lot for the update, it's nice knowing you're this far.

...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode .

Sweet!  Now, please drop the alert box that pops up when I type Ctrl+L.  Just focus the address field instead.

Awesome, so you'll finally be standards complient when IE8 launches in 2012?

Great news.

Simply said: congratulations! :)

These are the web's most talked about URLs on Wed 19th Dec 2007. The current winner is ..

So, we now know we have (in IE8 standards mode at least (BTW, what switch are you using for that, or is that still undecided?)):

- data URI scheme

- display: table

- position: fixed

Guess the old layout engine really was what was holding you back a lot, but there again, I could've guessed that years ago :P

Hi, Dean-

Great to see the progress you're making, not only in your implementation, but in communicating what's going on inside the IE development team.  Keeping the community informed is really critical.

Minor correction: the "X" in AJAX is "XML", not "XmlHttpRequest".  XML has been a standard for a good long while.  But it's true that XHR is just now being standardized by W3C, and is indeed the typical method of choice for AJAX (though not the only one... Adobe introduced the similar "getURL" long ago in their SVG viewer).

Thanks-

-Schepers

That's awesome news! Congrats guys!

Microsoft is currently in the middle of the process of creating the next generation Microsoft web browser, with the fantastic name - Internet Explorer 8. A few days ago, the IE team reports, the inter...

@cwilso: re: "Seriously, though, the point is that we have been out there listening to web developers and designers and what they need, at conferences and forums as well as reading the comments on our blog"

EXACTLY... NOT NEARLY ENOUGH.

First off, I haven't been to any dev conventions in the last year or so, because I don't have $1,000 to waste on them (sure I'd love to meet and chat with certain celebs within the community, but I'm not paying $1,000 for the chance to potentially file a verbal bug.

Second, this blog.  Is a Blog, not the appropriate venue for filing bug reports. I can't verify they've been read by an IE Team Dev that would be responsible for the issue, nor can I get feedback as to when the bug was verified by MS (or others), I can't post a simple (or complex) test case, I can't post a workaround for those also suffering from the bug, I can't see when the fix is targeted for, and or for what version(s) of IE. I also can't track the bug, as it moves through to its final published fix.

Most importantly, I don't have one, single, public repository where I can go search bugs (and workarounds) when I encounter an issue.

Since the dawn of this millennium, software vendors making a web browser ABSOLUTELY NEED a  public bug tracking system.  It is vital to the health of the community, the open 2-way communication that MS promised 2.5 years ago, and the minimal effort required to be seen as at least extending an olive branch.

By not having a public bug tracking site, you are instantly seen as an inferior product (whether you are or not).  Its like a company these days without a website.

But most of all, it shows poor taste.  It shows you don't give a hoot about developers, about standards, about fixing the core exposed API's, and the future of the Web.

Be serious please.  Even IE Team members posting on this very blog publicly admitted that Public Bug tracking was not only essential, but way overdue. (Circa March 24, 2006)

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx

"After much discussion on the team, we've decided that people are right and that we should have a public way for people to give us feedback or make product suggestions. We wanted to build a system that is searchable and can benefit from the active community that IE has here."

So, what's the hold up? If you need a few references for excellent (and mostly free) online bug tracking tools just let us know, we can recommend a few dozen for you that would fit in MS's budget)

@Chas: Why don't you use Alt+D?

passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ...

"developers have done special work to work well with IE6"

By special you mean frustrating, fruitless, and suicide-inducing, no?

Hmm. Why didn't this post show up in your RSS feed?

This one: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/rss.xml

Passing Acid2 is an impressive feat. It sounds like IE8 and FF3 are about on par with each other then, as far as Acid is concerned. Hopefully the rest of the standards are intact as well.

First of all: congratulations. "About friggin' time" - but good to see all the same.

Second, given your comments on your particular interpretation of "not breaking the web", has it been decided yet how "IE8 standards mode" will be triggered?

If no final decision has been made on this yet (I can only begin to imagine the internal debates - and I imagine a decision might completely depend on just how compatible the final engine will be), is just a regular HTML 4.01 (and XHTML 1.0) strict doctype with system identifier on the table at all? (I've heard noises before that it wouldn't be, but if the new engine is going to be good enough, that position might be reconsidered, ...right?)

This is probably going to be _the_ most important issue for web developers; far more important than any minor details on which specific implementation quirks you'll still be suffering from. Please communicate as much as possible about this as soon as possible. Knowing "nothing has been decided yet" really is going to be valuable information for us.

@Robbo

> passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ...

That's why Dean repeatedly stated in his post that ACID2 was merely one of several milestones for IE8.

It's nevertheless an important one, and it's very cool that we got an update when it was reached.

As I said above, I'd still have wished they'd done a Dave Hyatt-style serie of postings on the progress of IE to ACID2 pass, but... oh well.

En el blog oficial de Microsoft sobre Internet Explorer, afirman que la versión 8 del navegador que están desarrollando actualmente, pasa el famoso test de compatibilidad ACID 2, creado por el Web Standards Project.

Finally.

I'm a Mac-only shop but had to purchase Parallels and copies of Windows XP and Vista to check our compliant websites in IE6 and IE7. It's pretty ridiculous and I'd love to send a bill to Microsoft, but I have a feeling they won't be paying it.

I have more costs in my business because of Microsoft, particularly because I demand all of our products are 100% div-based, compliant, and accessible. Quality is important to us and Microsoft should have a vested interest in making our lives easier, for the betterment of the greater Internet.

I'm happy IE8 is finally taking steps toward this. The browser is years behind.

Oh. My. God.

I haven't even read the post yet, but...

Oh. My. God.

I can't believe it. You guys rock my face off. THANK YOU!

Maybe it's one of those every 4 versions thing? Internet Explorer 4 also blew Netscape 4 away when it came to standards-compliance, to be followed by many more iterative versions (not to say IE5 wasn't a good inprovement, it was).

I'm afraid though what I find more annoying in modern IE (talking about 7) is the utter lack of standardized *browser interface*... it's simply a mess, and having been an IE user for a long time before I switched to Firefox, I'm not just saying that 'cause I have a natural dislike against IE. (I could probably go into great length why the IE7 interface is bad, but I guess it's one of those "if you have to ask..." things.)

Anyway, congrats on passing this test -- your first link returns a connection time out message right now, by the way.

So when is IE8 going to be released?

@Chris,

There is a program to support developers who want to test out versions of the browsers for free.

IE6 and IE7 images are available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&DisplayLang=en

Nice, but it's called "Branch: LONGHORN_IE8", does this mean IE8 will only be released on Vista?

Now I can't wait until you release it at this time next year for Vista only.

@XP User: Don't jump to any conclusions.  IE7 built out of the "Longhorn" branch.

"I'm a Mac-only shop but had to purchase Parallels and copies of Windows XP and Vista to check our compliant websites in IE6 and IE7. It's pretty ridiculous and I'd love to send a bill to Microsoft, but I have a feeling they won't be paying it."

I had to buy a Mac a year and half ago to test in Safari. I'd like to send a bill to Apple.

Really, what's your point?

While I don't place an extreme amount of importance on the Acid tests, this is good news. I look forward to more information later down the road.

Congratulations guys, it is a great start and hopefully continues through to many other areas that people believe are missing in IE.

It probably won't keep everyone from slamming some aspect of IE, but I'd implore you to keep following this path and eventually (even after this) people will start to realise you are serious.

Me, I am just happy there is some competition again - so, about HTML5 :)

Well done guys.  It's too bad everything had to become secretive, but everyone asked for it by complaining about Vista overpromising.  IE7 Pro, by the way, has many good things including inline search (a feature which I would also like to have) as well as crash recovery (which is a necessity).  I also wish that there was feedback in the search bar as to what provider is currently selected (if you don't want to copy Firefox's showing an icon, at least add (provider) to the end of the current query, and then remove it when text is selected or a search is performed, similar to the grayed-out text that shows the provider when there is no current query).  Not knowing the currently selected search is another big annoyance (the others have been mostly solved by IE7Pro).

we have a WPF :D we are ever different :D :D :D

Cool info, but the goods are all in the video.

(info on how you trigger "better" rendering in IE, is abscent, but indicates the following is fixed)

Data URL - Now implemented

CSS Display Table type properties - fixed/implemented

CSS Relative positioning - fixed (shrink to fit)

HTML closing p tag - ??

Object fallback now co?

HTML abbr tag now fixed

CSS generated content - fixed

No info given on what is fixed in JavaScript (or what isn't)

This is good news. I've never heard of the Acid2 Face before, but just noticed (as have others) that Firefox 2 fails it

All I can say is: Thank you. Keep up the good work.

Microsoft is practically in a monopoly position and can do whatever it wants. Therefore the problems with IE6 made people hate MS. Now though, I'm already starting to gain my respect for you guys back and I'm sure if this trend continues so will everyone else.

Nice. Thanks. It sure looks like MS is starting to "adapt" and "assimilate" -  kinda like the Borg.

It was silly to count them out, they were just lumbering along.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx As a team

This is great news, but that "in IE8 standards mode" worries me. What is this "standards mode"?

If there's a special mode you have to kick IE8 into before this increased standards compliance takes effect, that's essentially meaningless, because most people won't change the default configuration. So these changes need to be in the most basic, unchanged IE configuration, the one every non-expert Windows users gets.

If this is going to be the case and "IE8 standards mode" is something different - then great, and congratulations.

Adam Williamson

Mandriva

It's good that IE is finally catching up to Opera.  Let's see if Firefox follows suit...

What exactly is "IE8 standards mode", is it yet another rendering method that we would have to do something special for to trigger? And that other browser-vendors eventually will have to support in order to be interoperable with IE? Thus hurting both the browservendors that are doing the right thing and standards-aware web-authors as well?

Okay, this will mean nothing to most people out there, but to web developers, particularly those who use standards-based design to maximize compatibility with different browsers, this is monumental.

An internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed

This is a great announcement.

I will be tempted to use IE much more often than I have been.

Is IE8 going to support a border-box model while in standards compliant mode like the other browsers?  IE goes from one extreme to the other using border box in quirks mode and content box in standards mode.  

Border box is the easier approach, yet compliance to standards is required for other reasons.  It's ridiculous to require breaking the page to use border box.

Awesome!!!  This is great news!

  :-/

Why do I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, though?

OMG, Is it fools day? I can't believe, really.

To be fair to Firefox, v3 will be fully Acid2 compliant (trunk builds have been so for ages). Great to see IE catching up though! I'm intrigued - has the concept of hasLayout gone now?

Hmm, nice picture. Photoshop? ;) Give some beta nightbuild.

Yes... I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, too, and I bet that "IE8 standards mode" is the shoe. If that mode is NOT the default, then it won't matter, because Joe Sixpack won't know to turn it on... and MS can continue to leverage its monopoly.

> Let's see if Firefox follows suit...

Firefox 3 has been rendering Acid2 correctly for ages..

ms probably should;d have delayed this till the 25th

I bet you have to check an option in Internet Options > Advanced > Enable 'Standards Mode' (may slow down overall experience on any computer)

What a great Christmas present from the I.E team. How ironic that this comes out a week after those whinny people at Opera accuse IE of not supporting web standards. I don't suppose any of the Opera fanboys will be eating their words after reading this.

Please keep us posted IE team!

Awesome news!  Keep up the great work!

@Tino Zijdel: more detail on "IE8 standards mode" in a soon-to-come post.  And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode.  :)

Good news. Too bad IE6 will still probably be the most used browser and we developers will STILL have to cater to it.

People, there has been a "Standards" mode and a "Quirks" mode in IE for a couple of versions now. The question is whether this takes over the existing Standards mode or if there is a new IE8 Standard mode in addition to the existing one.

Congratulations to Markus, Chris and the IE team for doing the right thing here.

Is this build specially hacked or adjusted to make sure it passes.

The long and short of it: Congratulations!

Wow, this is great news guys! Keep up the good work and I can't wait for MIX ;)

Btw, did you get the postcard I sent you? ;)

If IE 8 ships and it really does support web standards and passes the Acid Test, kudos to the IE Team and Microsoft.  

this is a nice update, thanks for sharing.  and please keep the updates and transparency flowing so you can begin to earn back the benefit of the doubt across your entire product line.  baby steps can in fact lead to big steps.

congrats

Tom, it is clearly "adjusted to make sure it passes." That's what code checkins do... :-)

Thanks guys!

Make sure you can force it on the world somehow so we can stop targeting all those fools on IE6 :-)

Quit moaning about this standards mode thing.

It will be "Standards mode" vs "Quirks mode" where if you're not using a Strict Doctype then you'll get thrown into quirks mode.

It's been like that for years.

Basically, it the HTML is written correctly, then it'll work correctly.

Good news, although we only see an image, which doesn't proof anything.

Anyways, welcome to 2005.

@Andrew: IE7 is steadily replacing IE6; as described previously on this blog, it's already surpassed IE6 in the US and UK.

You should rename a bunch of your source files. Long and case-sensitive filenames are being supported since Windows 95, you know ;-)

John,

There was discussion on the HTML Working Group's email list about doing versioning of HTML (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0612.html, linked from Chris' blog).

This makes one wonder if it is "Standards mode" or "IE8 Standards Mode," "Standards Mode," and "Quirks Mode."

!!! :) :) :)

This announcement exceeded my expectations. My opinion of IE has just improved dramatically.

This post has made me incredibly happy.

I remember the last time I read a post on this blog, 85% of the comments were angry demands for Microsoft to take web standards more seriously. This leads me to believe that someone is actually listening to the clamoring of the crowd. Combining that with Dean's proposed brag-when-it's-done philosophy makes me look at IE8 in a very optimistic light. That's something I never before dreamed that I would do.

Keep it up.

Great news. does IE8 will only be released on Vista or it will also for XP?

Well done! This is great news. Please, please, please urge for this to be available on XP — and strongly recommend updating. With a little luck, the nightmare of IE-only stylesheets might pass into legend, where it belongs.

"MicroKid" -- Basically no browser supported ACID2 in 2005.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

I'll forgive you, but first I'll need some proof that you've also worked on DOM and SVG support as well.

And what about Forms 2.0 and native video/audio tags? APNG?

i believe ie8 will come in two versions one for vista one for xp (vista having protected mode and stuff)

but ie8 will probably be the last version for windows xp

Great news!

I hope you will soon also share some good news about improved DOM/JS support in IE8!

and to other commenters complaining on this thread about IE6 - with all due respect, you're hurting the developer's cause, not helping.  we're all frustrated with IE's evolution, but if we don't encourage updates and progress reports like this, and instead rant about prior transgressions every chance we get, our collective voice and influence will be weakened.

there's a time and a place for everything.

I actually do wonder if IE8 will be Vista only but that would probably involve Microsoft cutting its own throat then.

Bill Gates: "It compiles! Ship it!"

This looks like great news, though of course it's still early days if the beta's potentially six months off.

I'd really like to know what IE8's User Interface is going to be like. Quite frankly, I think IE7's interface changes where an absolute disaster and at least partially responsible for its relatively poor uptake. To paraphrase Dean, "When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the User Interface features that worked before will still work." I'd hope that IE8's changes are more conservative, or offer a choice of an IE6-like UI with the first-run wizard.

Even with SP2's reactivation of the menu bar and the recent removal the WGA check, IE7 still has over ten percent less market share than IE6, according to most stats. What is Microsoft going to do to make sure that IE8 becomes relevant quickly? Is it going to be released for XP or will it be Vista-only? Will there be WGA checks? Most importantly, how is Microsoft going to wean people off IE6?

Great Work!

The concept of having to "hack" code to make a site work on all browsers will soon be a thing of the past.

Awesome. Somebody tell Ian Hickson to get ACID3 published, stat!

Great - and about time! Now, if only IE wouldn't use twice the memory that Firefox does...

Whilst this may not be something deemed as particularly important by web users, web developers will be

Thank you for:

1) such great news

2) being more communicative with us

3) the opening of a dialogue, hopefully

There are plenty of us developers who will enjoy this moment with you for a while before getting back to bitching about bugs and feature requests. :)

Cheers!

Great news.

But what about crashing/slow flash; forgetting more than 30 open tabs; bad support for unicode filenames?

What about native .Net addons support with native .Net rights?

If Acid 2 is rendering, then the current standards mode seems to have been updated, rather than there being a new mode.

Isso aí é falso, não é possível!!!

The best news in this entry, from my point of view:

* Compatibility with existing content.

* User experience.

* A possible XP release.

* The upcoming beta.

* Confirmation that you've been reading the feedback.

Personally, I'd be fine with reading IE8's aspirations on this blog. If you make clear what's an aspiration and what's a code check-in, who could that hurt? A great conversation needs more than a good listener, imho.

Like spoon feeding water to a man who has walked the desert for more than a year, news about IE8 has

How said IE doesn't support Acid2?

Good work! Posting this from FF and Linux, but I like to keep track of IE progress as I'm tired of pages not working for me. Keep it going.

P.S. I strongly urge you add a public bug tracking website. Get those managers convinced as I'm sure the developers and QA-ers would be on-board.

Awesome! Now if you could give the world a gift: in the next IE update you ship, put in a little trojan that kills IE6 for good. I mean really kills it - like doesn't allow users to actually fire it up.

And there will be much rejoicing throughout the land.

A browser is only good if people actually switch to using it. While IE6 roams free, web developers will forever hate microsoft...no matter how good new products are...

P.P.S. It'd be nice if you signaled to the user when a webpage was standards compliant (say some nice smiley face somewhere on the address bar or something more innocuous) to encourage people to make their pages compliant.

Video Die erste sinnvolle Information über den Internet Explorer 8 hat das Licht der Welt erblickt: Er besteht den akademischen 'Acid 2' Test. (No compliance test, it's a test of present features). Im Video wird ausdrücklich darauf hingewiesen, d

Congratulations to the IE team. This is good news indeed. I won't lie, though: IE 7 should have been what IE 8 is going to be, and web developers aren't at all happy about it.

Keep the updates coming, and give us stuff to play with (release early, release often), and you'll find we're generally a forgiving bunch.

(Oh, and I'm fairly sure you guys invented the *A* in AJAX, not the X: given that it's stands for *Asynchronous* Javascript and XML, for which XMLHttpRequest is responsible for the former!)

Omfg...

Did hell just freeze over?

Amazing news, although it is about 5 years late, good news non the less!

WOW, but is IE still used by anyone?

@Pat

You're missing the point. Internet Explorer is infamous for holding back progress and technological innovation on the web.

Video Die erste sinnvolle Information über den Internet Explorer 8 hat das Licht der Welt erblickt: Er besteht den akademischen 'Acid 2' Test. (No compliance test, it's a test of present features). Im Video wird ausdrücklich darauf hingewiesen, d

Thanks for your effort guys, let the good times roll!

I see a smiley, but I'd like a running build to test this and other things by myself. I can make this smiley image in two minutes :)

Acid2, is by no means a complete measure of CSS standards support and CSS is not the only standard.  In fact, many IE issues are not CSS-related.

I honestly think that this whole affair with IEBlog and talking with developer community, etc., is a bunch of public relations B.S. The fact that they are touting the Acid 2 test is just proof of this. Whereas other browsers have been continuously improving their standards support and then at a certain point passed this test too, these jokers haven't done a thing worth mentioning -- and then, out of the blue, look, our vaporware IE8 passes Acid 2 and we have a whole PNG to prove it!

Really, one must be naive to buy into this sort of PR/marketing nonsense and to think anyone at Microsoft (at least decisions makers) gives a damn about web developers or web standards. What they care about (by definition) is market share and share price. None of this would occur if it wasn't for other browsers chipping away at browser market.

Congrats to the IE team! This is great news for the web...

Can you try  my http://okno.n9ery.com/~jacek/LasVegas2007/

in Firefox first (change browser's window size) and then in IE8? IE7 has problems with switching default CSS to alternate when modifying window size.

Jack

[email protected]

Congrats!  This is a great step.

I have Firefox 3 Beta 2, and the Acid 2 test page doesn't render correctly. Is it just me?

Congrats. This is good news for all.

Nice work! I think I have last few wishes for IE:

1) Support for SVG (also in CSS background)

2) Support for <video> tag (just like experimental Opera and experimental Firefox) with Theora codec

3) Not using quirks when opening page like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="/css" ?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"

       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

These 3 above and I'll quite like IE ;)

First of all, congratulations to the IE Team, and thank you, Dean, for sharing this information with us. As a web developer, I am pleased that you have achieved this goal, and to know definitively that you are working to be more standards compliant.

Second, with regard to all the people saying, "Finally!" (especially the All Mac guy moaning about buying a copy of XP for testing)... Might I remind you all that not even Firefox passes the Acid2 test as of 2.0.0.11. It does a much better job and is currently more compliant than IE7, but it still fails the test. If you're not testing your designs in multiple browsers, regardless of standards compliance levels, you're a piss poor developer, end of story.

Third, to those saying the IE team isn't listening, I also would love to see a permanent, public site for bug-tracking like that provided with Mozilla's Bugzilla, but at the same time, it is nice to see that the year since IE7's release has involved reading the blog comments and working on improving compatibility.

Finally, I look forward to the IE8 beta!

Best regards,

Aaron Hall

Congratulations!  IE has transformed itself in the recent years and developers are rejoicing.  Well done.

OK, I lied... I have one more wish ;) Please make IE understand such a CSS:

opacity: value;

justsean and others reporting Firefox 3.0b2 failures - Hixie has confirmed that something's buggering up on their end right now, hence why the test is failing. It's not a Firefox issue, though.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172

Kudos to the team! As far as I'm concerned, and without sarcasm, it's the best piece of news coming out of Microsoft in years. It will impact how millions of web developers work throughout the world. Also please don't forget XP: make the distribution of IE8 as wide as possible, we all need it. But anyhow, for now it's... champagne!

For you firefox 3 fanboys you may want to check again Firefox 3 Beta 1 is no longer compliant.

Triggering standards mode is all about using a strict doctype, at the top of your document. I don't know if this changed in IE7 (I should check sometime), or will change in IE8, but in IE6 this doctype has to be the very first line of the document. No comments, no white-space, and definitely no <?xml declaration can occur before it, if you want standards mode.

If this didn't change in IE7, then it would be nice to see a more robust detection of a strict doctype.

It's about time. Although, everyone said IE7 was going to be just as good as FireFox in rendering CSS1 and some CSS2 (it's not). So I'm certainly not holding my breath. Fix the peek-a-boo bug for IE8 and we'll talk. Also, force users to update. As much as I love having two stylesheets to accommodate IE6 users, I'd like to not be forced into using three.

Oh, and give us a Firebug. Something lightyears better than IE Web Developer Toolbar.

someone edited the acid 2 test page all browser now fail it the eyes area to be precise

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone これでOperaの訴えの根拠の1つはなくなることになりますね。ちなみにIE9のコードネームはTritonのようです。

Cher Stewart

by the time ie8 is out ie6 will be at about 5 percent market share

I don't know if this has already been mentioned (I'm too tired to read all these comments) but does nobody else find it interesting that this terrific news should come shortly after Opera were reported to be filing a very relevant complaint with the EC?

"The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious 'Embrace, Extend and Extinguish' strategy. Microsoft's unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain, and technologically inferior and that can even expose users to security risks." from http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/opera_ec_complaint/

Very nice post, anyway. Brilliant news delivered so well.

By the way, to the moron who ranted about only seeing a screenshot here, go watch the video posted at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=367207

Bravo.

This shows a major shift in Microsoft's philosophy and priorities and I welcome it.

Good job on a major achievement and one giant step for making web developers lives easier. I spend 50% of my time just making things work right in IE6.

Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone(IE Blog)より IE7 が Acid2 のテストをパスするというマイルストーンを通過したようです。

Congrats on passing Acid2. Nice job.

There are a few comments posted here indicating that IE6 is still dominant. I don't think so.

I posted some stats this week showing that IE7 is now dominant -- at least with the data I've collected.

http://blogs.lotterypost.com/speednet/2007/12/ie7-has-now-overtaken-ie6.htm

I have grown accustomed to the IE7 interface, and I hope it doesn't change too much in IE8.

If IE had the slash-type-search feature like Firefox and Opera AND it did not wipe my URL content during the start-up race, then I could be tempted to use it again. Just two simple fixes please guys!!!

Congratulations! That is an important milestone to be proud of. Hopefully there will be many more as things progress.

"don't know if this has already been mentioned (I'm too tired to read all these comments) but does nobody else find it interesting that this terrific news should come shortly after Opera were reported to be filing a very relevant complaint with the EC?"

yeah obviously MS just stuck their devs in a room over the weekend and made ie standards compliant. Doy ou have any idea how stupid that sounds, to get to where they are would have taken months if not years of development as there was an awefull lot to fix.

I guess the Microsoft Internet Explorer team took the developer complaints about lack of Internet Explorer 8 information to heart. Today, much reviled Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch took to the Microsoft IEBlog to report that the

Congratulations! About time you guys too standards seriously and not went off on your own merry way making up stuff as you went along. Should we really applaud this new and it's mention all over the web? No.

"Rafał Miłecki wrote:

OK, I lied... I have one more wish ;) Please make IE understand such a CSS:

opacity: value;

"

I would love to see that too. The alpha filter works horribly with (semi)transparent images like GIF, PNG24 and PNG32.

That's great that IE8 will support standards,

but no one in the company I work for will use it as long as Vista is the required operating system.

Passing the Acid 2 test is a major step forward, and one I honestly didn't expect IE8 to make, so I'm extremely pleased with this news.

That said, there are still a couple major issues I'd like to see resolved, as well as one new issue this post raises:

1) You mention "standards compliant" mode... the vast majority of IE8 users will have little to no idea what that actually is and will not be able to switch between different rendering modes if they are required.  Therefore, will IE8 be able to automatically detect the correct mode to use when rendering a page, or will users be forced to make the change manually?

This really does need to be automatic (such as, if a DocType is defined, use the "standards compliant" mode).  Otherwise it becomes an extremely promising change that just fails to deliver in the end.

2) Fix the "Operation Aborted" JS DOM error.  This is perhaps the most annoying bug I've ever seen with a web browser since it completely prevents you from being able to use a web page for no reason.  Standards compliance and this are easily the 2 biggest issues I have with IE, everything else I'd be willing to wait for.

3) IE8 needs to be available for XP as well as Vista, and Microsoft needs to make a reasonable attempt at getting users to make the upgrade.  The uptake of IE7 has been painfully slow (I'm still seeing 75% IE6, 25% IE7 on my sites).  If this is released for Vista only, then it's not going to actually make a difference for at least 4-5 years (or basically after Windows 7 is released for a year or more).  In that amount of time, there's going to be a whole new set of compatibility issues, such as HTML5 and XHTML2.

Wait... what the? I was just <a href="http://www.gabrielmcgovern.com/blog/2007/12/19/all-i-want/">writing about how all I wanted for x-mas</a> was a standards complaint version of Internet Explorer!

@Chris Wilson

You opened up a can of worms indicating that you are accepting feedback.

1.) Where are you accepting feedback, I have not seen a url posted on this blog for feedback since the IE Feedback site, which of course has been dead for over a year.

2.) Same question as 1.

3.) Same question as 2.

4.) Same question as 3.

5.) Seriously, where is it! We've only been complaining about this for 5 years now.

dom

Wait... what the? I was just writing about how all I wanted for x-mas was a standards complaint version of Internet Explorer!

Try this one instead:

http://www.gabrielmcgovern.com/blog/2007/12/19/all-i-want/

GOOD JOB!!! THIS IS GREAT NEWS, KEEP UP THE GOOD JOB!

Gabriel, don't except it for Christmas...unless you mean *maybe* next Christmas.

Congratulations on the milestone. I remember of myself complaining abou this two years ago...

Congrats

Excellent, thank you!!!

Please tell us that next on the list is proper Javascript support.

> so that IE8 (1) continues to work

> with the billions of pages on the

> web today that already work in IE6

> and IE7

Translates to: "It will still be broken as IE6 was".

Please, you did the "Quirks Mode" thing once, do something similar again: if the page is XHTML 1.1, with a "correct" header, it will render 1:1 STANDARDS COMPLIANT.

Otherwise, it will "continue to work...IE6 and IE7".

Just, please remember that the "trigger" should be something within the standards, not outside. The "worse" scenario could be a non-standard comment (like the IE version one) that triggers the "old" behavior.

Or, take the "marketing route" and completely change the brand or communicate it clearly: you have to upgrade your website using standards technologies.

But please, please, please, stop with this "backward compatibility" thing that killed IE7 and I think it could kill also IE8.

I have left just about everything MS behind in my home life out of frustration from what it does to my professional life.

I am not here to criticize, I just want to say that I am glad that IE is shooting for better standards compliance. A2 is a great step forward. I hope that it isn't the end though.

Good work!

Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!!!

This could save me hundreds of hours of work each year. Thanks for making a commitment to CSS with this release!

Microsoft does conduct feedback - through IE error reports. Duh.

Good job IE team.

I know IE8 must be really something big, or else you guys wouldn't be keeping it such a secret :)

I'm guessing that IE8 will try to vie for the "Best browser award", and I hope that you try your hardest to keep up to it.

Dean, Chris, time for a frank talk with the dev community on the IE Blog.

Standards vs. Quirks, will allow us to ensure that IE8 Renders things the way we expect (or at least way better) in IE8, by triggering Standards mode (however it is done, I don't care, and I'm ready to start coding for it)

But (yeah, there is always a but...)

The majority of fixes that we are waiting for in IE8 are JavaScript/DOM based.  The JavaScript bugs in IE6 (and IE7) occur REGARDLESS of Standards or Quirks mode.

What we need to openly discuss (whether you've decided how you are implementing it or not), is what the plan is to ensure the correct implementations are called when we call methods, etc.

If it hasn't been carved in stone, may I suggest the following.

1.) Ok, since this is to fix JS, the trigger should be in JS.

2.) Missing implementations can just be added (they won't break anything)

3.) The trigger really only needs to therefore be on methods that were implemented correctly...

3.a) For each method being fixed (since it is an object too), add an expando property to it.

e.g.

//use fixed version

if(document.getElementById){

 document.getElementById._complyWithSpec = true;//tell IE to use the fixed implementation

}

3.b) Presuming that prototyping on HTMLElements will also be fixed, the spec flag for methods can be placed there also.

e.g.

//use fixed version

if(HTMLElement){

 HTMLElement.getElementsByName._complyWithSpec = true;//tell IE to use the fixed implementation

}

4.) For those of us that want all fixes, with no fuss a global flag would be nice.

e.g.

//fix all of IE's implementations

if(window.external){

 window.external._globalComplyWithSpec = true;

}

I realize that whatever the approach, it is difficult to implement, but I do want to assure you that we most certainly WANT the corrected versions, and if I have to have a CC with a few lines to get IE into shape I'll HAPPILY do so!

jasper

Acid2 is NOT a standards compliance test.  It is a test to see how well your browser takes non-compliant CSS, so that it is rendered consistantly.  You don't need it if websites are written right.

People are whinging that FF2 doesn't render it... well FF3 (beta) already does, which does mean they have beaten MS to the punch.  FF3 beta you can download TODAY, while IE8 will be restricted to some internal Microsoft version control repository.

Good work that MS are playing catchup, but a public bug tracking system is very much in order!  If I report them to the generic Microsoft contact page, I don't get any tracking of my request... it gets lost in a pile, no updates, not anything... Ideally there should be bug trackers for other Microsoft developments, not just IE.

My current job generally results in me writing a standards-compliant web page (which works in everything else), then tweaking it for another two hours after that to get it working in IE6 and IE7.  It stinks.

Some people work from the other angle, writing a non-compliant page for IE6 and IE7, relying on IE quirks mode features, and hoping for the best  that it'll come out right in other browsers (which it never does, because we don't know the behaviour of IE quirks mode - we don't have source), or just blocking out non-IE browsers all together.

It's about time MS does something right for a change.  I just hope its as standards compliant in both HTML and CSS as Safari and Firefox are.  And also make this both an XP and Vista release because IMO Vista is terrible, but I use OS X anyways.  My guess is by the time IE8 is acutally released Firefox will be in version 4 and, once again, IE will be lacking behind.

This entry discusses the news of Internet Explorer 8 passing the Acid 2 test.

How about the nose color change and suppressed scroll bars?

Hey IE Team, please visit this site using your new build of the rendering engine and see how many of these you fixed using IE 8:

http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html

Awesome news.  Good job!  I'm anxiously awaiting the IE 8 beta cycle (and accompanying bug-reporting/feedback site, right?)

@WebHacker-- check out the video to see the nose and behavior.

Well, all I can say to the older members of the team is shame on you. I, and many thousands of others have spent longer than you can imagine working around IE bugs. I doubt you'll ever truly realise what a terrible terrible job you've done and how helish you've made people's lives. Seriously.

Many thanks to the person who finally saw sense and lead the team to making IE8 compatible with CSS standards.

Here's another note of appreciation for achieving this milestone.

And a big echo to everyone who has expressed frustration at the lack of a public bug tracking system. I was quite disillusioned to put the time and effort to develop a simplified test case to pinpoint a problem during the IE7 beta process, only to have it disappear down some black hole when I tried to report it.

And I'll add this: Internet Explorer isn't the only Microsoft product that would benefit immensely (if only in PR) from public bug tracking. I'm speaking here as an Office user/developer.

I know a lot of resources would have to go into separating product bugs from user ignorance (who knew that Alt-D would take you to the address bar, instead of Ctrl-L like all other browsers?), but I for one would be willing to establish my credentials (by passing some sort of acid test, I guess) so that I could earn the privilege of reporting the bugs I find to MS.

@Sonu Kapoor "Thats great. I just made the test with Firefox and it failed."

Yeah, I tried the test with IE7 and it failed as well.  Think this guy's lying about IE passing the test?

Meeting the standard is one thing, but actually changing your product proves to one and all that you're actually listening! That's the coolest part of this achievement in my books.

You mention compatibility with older formats, what's stopping you from providing multiple rendering engines, and letting the user choose from a set of thumbnails the output they like best? If you had a feedback process similar to the anti-phishing tool, IE could offer the thumbnails based on domain/URL as needed.

That one's for free guys, no strings attached. Nice job on Acid2.

Well done, indeed!  Now I can't wait for the announcement that DOM Level 2 is also supported...

The IE team has been very hard at work on IE 8 for the past several months and they hit a huge milestone

Well about time, cant wait to test it...

Thanks IE team!

> which standards are the most

> important for us to support?

Improved CSS support will of course be good, but experienced web developers can already work around the bugs.

The standards I most want supported are SVG, and the new html5 canvas and video elements.

cheers,

For so long, we heard that failing to render Acid2 was a design choice, and that it isn't a true standard, so it's not important whether it gets rendered or not.  

"the Acid 2 Test covers a wide set of functionality and standards, not just from CSS2.1 and HTML 4.01, selected by the authors as a “wish list” of features they’d like to have. It’s pointedly not a compliance test (from the Test Guide: “Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification”). As a wish list, it is really important and useful to my team, but it isn’t even intended, in my understanding, as our priority list for IE7." - http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx

So, when MS says IE8 renders Acid2, but no word about whether the actual CSS 2.1 spec is a goal or just a "wishlist" like Acid2 was for IE7, where does that leave us?

You have implemented somethng that is a "wish list", and you took many paragraphs above explaining that it's not a standard, and essentially saying it's not even very important.  So now MS says "We do Acid2" and the rest of the world says "Nice job with an unimportant non-standard.  How are you coming with the actual CSS 2 spec?

This post, following the year of silence, makes me think that either a lone dev decided to test Acid2 on his own and was surprised that it worked, or a lone dev realized how close the rendering code was and made a few tweaks to make it work.  This does not sound to me, especially in light o the above quote and all of the stuff in the blog about this being a non-standard, that it was only passed accidentally.  No one actually had Acid2 on the feature list and said let's do this.  

Hopefully what I want you to see is how much your silence in the past hurt even your achievements in the present, and future.  This is my perspective based on all information available to me.

Well slap me with a moldy turnip and colour me flabbergasted!  Who would've thought.  If IE8 - when released - still complies with W3C standards to the same degree or better than Safari, Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera, then I'll be pleased.  I've spent too many hours cursing Microsoft's name doing workarounds for IE6 and IE7 to consider it fait accompli.  

I just think it's a sad thing that Microsoft are receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should've done 5-7 years ago...

I'll be pleased when I can look back on this day in 5 years and see that Microsoft has about-faced and started making compliance with relevant open standards (and I'm not including MSOOXML in that) a requirement for release.

All the best,

Dave

@Rocjoe: That's not exactly a great idea. :/

Please please, improve the browser interface too to something more desirable and attractive. In IE7 we were dropped with an illogical, sucky and undesirable layout interface. And there is no need for a gigantic address bar (*hint* button click to see full URL ). Real estates don't come cheap:)

Now on to the standards compliance!

Oh and by the way, the IE8 aplha/beta for us web developers too. It's about time.

I doubt you'll get a chance to reply to me individually, but I'd be VERY curious to see how your new builds of IE8 perform on the CSS selector test here:

http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/

...if you actually get a chance to run it I'd love to hear the results. My email is xxdesmus @ Google's email service.

Regards, and great work guys. Keep it up!

"Awareness"-- You seem to have a reading problem.

In the quote you cited, they directly state that ACID 2 is "really important" which you inaccurately paraphrase as "not even very important."

As to whether they'll do all of CSS2.1, sure, it's interesting.  but this is a good sign.

Great job guys, keep up the great work. I really appreciate all of the work you put into passing the test.

Keep on trying until you reach the level of firefox!! ;)

http://www.spymac.com/details/?2315603

xxdesmus, cool tests, for others enjoyment, here's what I got:

firefox 2.0.0.11:

From the 43 selectors 26 have passed, 10 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 357 out of 578 tests)

konqueror 3.5.6:

From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)

opera 9.23:

From the 43 selectors 25 have passed, 3 are buggy and 15 are unsupported (Passed 346 out of 578 tests)

Those of us who are "real" developers, we realize Acid2 is not that significant and any browser vendor can tweak their code to make it pass.  But this does not make a browser compliant with anything overall and Dean alludes to this in his comments.

Another red flag is this "which standards should we support?" comment.  Right away Dean is opening the door for "Microsoft Windows" compliant items that are not friendly to any other browser or operating system.

I can't possibly know what IE8 holds in store, or when we'll actually see this thing, but Microsoft has never been forthcoming or trustworthy in the past and there is no reason to believe they will now.  

I find it hilarious to hear MS is complaining about how IE7 renders sites correctly if you change the user-agent string so that the site doesn't think it's internet explorer. Something ironic about it. :)

So... since your developers can have both IE7 and IE8 natively on their systems, can we PLEASE get them as stand alone and not force us to run VMs?

Internet Explorer 8 Officially Doesn't Suck

Whoa. Just––whoa.

Here's yet another guy who can't wait for IE8 to be on most IE-using PCs.

> While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better

Wait. Could this mean, that IE8 will be open source? Sounds like it would be the most impressing and clever action MS could do.

Though, step by step. Thank for working on the CSS-front!

This is very good news. I'm hoping in the future it will allow me to spend less time trying to develop cross browser compliant CSS and Javascript.

Hmm odd that the test would quit working in Opera and Safari the same day this is posted. Seems like the w3 test has probably been bought off by Microsoft. This is beyond bullshit.

It's good news.

I expect that Microsoft releases IE8 to Windows XP SP3. I fear that Microsoft releases IE8 to Vista.

Hopefully IE8 will solve all (and it better) the problems related to CSS hacks that we have faced in

Three words: public bug tracking.

Since no one has brought it up PLEASE implement border-radius!

Amazing work, IE team! Developers have been ranting about this for a long time, and it finally passes the test!

You've made great strides, and it seems that you want to continue down that path. Keep up the good work!

Amazing work, IE team! Developers have been ranting about this for a long time, and it finally passes the test!

You've made great strides, and it seems that you want to continue down that path. Keep up the good work!

"Hmm odd that the test would quit working in Opera and Safari the same day this is posted. Seems like the w3 test has probably been bought off by Microsoft."

Wait ...   What?!

... I .. I just confirmed this .. The ACID2 test just worked in Opera a couple days ago, it's not working now.. I can't believe it!! Did the test get stricter, or was it hacked just for Microsoft to pass the test?!!!

This is great news. Finally I can have a smiley face on my web site.

Hey, at this rate I can stop having a conditional comment linking to iesucks.css some time around...hmm...IE10?  I'll probably stop supporting IE on my websites before then anyway.  By the time IE10 comes out, Firefox will have a higher marketshare than all versions of IE combined anyway.

@ xxdesmus & AC:

Firefox 3 Beta 1: From the 43 selectors 30 have passed, 4 are buggy and 9 are unsupported (Passed 367 out of 578 tests)

Much too late, but THANK YOU for finally deciding it's not worth having thousands of web developers hating you.

Web developers around the world are raising their voices in cheer today because of the IEBlog's grand announcement: Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID2 Test. Readers of this blog who are not web designers are probably wondering what all the...

Can someone explain why it is that the same day IE8 passes the Acid2 test, WebKit/KHTML/Opera/FF3 are all suddenly failing the test?  All of those were previously confirmed to have passed the test.

Was the test changed to accommodate IE8?  And secondly, how did the test change?

Will I finally be able to stop cursing IE?

I know we are a long way off from a release but I am optimistic based on the news today.

I've estimated IE6/7 costs the web development industry well over $1Billion per year due to lost productivity (debugging IE CSS rendering and creating work arounds specifically for IE).

I long for the day when I can write code once and 'just have it work' across browsers.

It is just a shame that it took so long for:

a) the IE team to be resurrected

b) to begin embracing standards in earnest

I weep for the my many lost development hours over the past several years because IE stagnated in a broken state.

Congrats on the ACID2 test.

andre

I will never be a Microsoft user, but I'm very happy to see you're finally working with the standards world instead of trying to "be" the standards world.  Congratulations and keep up the good work.

And so it continues.  The endless posts by people who claim to be "developers" and praise this announcement but, instead, only show what they don't know.

Passing Acid2 means nothing.  It's cute.  And it's like putting those little W3C logos saying "Validates HTML4.01!" but little beyond that.

Microsoft has shown you nothing.  It's words hidden behind words.  No product shown.  No proof of concept.  No "Look what we fixed!".  No nothing.  Only words.

Slashdot is watching.

have you read: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172

and have you verified it against:

http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/

I have been very critical of IE in the past, but his is very good news. Congratulations and thank you!

you know, the smiley face is way too far to the right in your picture there. So, either, iE8 doesn't pass, or thats a big fat fake.

Oh at last, you have decided to go with the standards.. Well done... This releives us(web developers) a lot..

The Acid2 test is currently broken:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

Of course, that assumes the interested parties haven't been f*cking with the data:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Main_Page

1st: Congratulations. Finally.

2nd: So it took Molly Holzschlag to talk to Bill Gates and Opera to fie a lawsuit in Europe for you to bring out this information? Seems MS needs a hit in the stomach to wake up and belch out some information.

So if we step up the pressure that way, IEX will someday really be worth smiling at and not screaming in pain since you either have to use CSS conditional comments or CSS hacks.

3rd: Again congratulations :)

"Oh, and IE NEEDs Pipelining with up to 8+ network connections at one time."

Hell no! Having 8+ simultaneous connections means roughly  exponential growth in server loads, which means many websites will get really laggy. (At least those based on Windows.)

I long for the day when I can embed images into web pages, as Acid2 does with base64, and slap it on an ie window and say ooh, shiny.  I guess my dream starts coming true July.

Acid2 ain't even close to everything, and everyone and their mom seems to have figured it out at this point, but it's still a big step forward.  Well done.

It's surprising to see some people inspite of being web "developers" don't know about "standards mode" and "quirks mode". Anyway, congrats IE team. I've 1000+ rants and bug reports but I don't want to discourage you right now. Btw, if:

"We’re building IE8 for many different customers (consumers, web service providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, web developers, and others." then how about also building IE8 for media and print/photo professionals and including JPEG 2000, HD Photo, SVG, APNG and ICCv4 color management support and A-V tags, opacity: value; etc?

I hope the IE does not forget over time that "Acid2, is by no means a complete measure of CSS standards support and CSS is not the only standard. In fact, many IE issues are not CSS-related."

And btw, if you don't continue to release IE9,10,11 for XP, forget it. I'll still be pissed off. Because Opera 9 also runs on Windows 95 and MS should make a browser independent of their beloved OS. It is not just your duty to support Windows XP, people won't care about IE and use some other browser, its share will increase if you don't keep supporting XP even when Windows 7 or 8 comes out.

And I second a public bug-tracking system. And "third" a ""Fix the "Operation Aborted" JS DOM error.""

And as a punishment to MS for not supporting standards for sooooo long, I probably won't switch to IE8 if all is supports is just Acid2 compliance...maybe IE9 raises the standards compliance to 98% +, then I'll surely consider.

Dealing with Microsoft is like pulling teeth.

No, I don't share all the hoopla generated by earlier comments since key questions have yet to be answered.

Will IE8 be available for XP?

Will IE8 be unnecessarily integrated into the OS (yet again)?

As is the custom with Microsoft, we'll probably not find out until a day before the release as they continue to plot their next move.

Keeping businesses and consumers in the dark is always a sound move - because none of us are capable of planning more than a few days in advance. We love surprises and the possibility of another forced OS upgrade looming over our heads.

Internet Explorer 8 a trecut testul Acid2! Toată știrea AICI .

So let me see if I got this straight. This is actually achieved by proper use of CSS, right? It is not hardcoded (if (url == acid2_test_url) {displaySmileyFace();}), right?

I think I'm going to cry for joy.

I checked bogus "ACID 2 test" and found that it is broken. Probably it is only coincidence and IE8 will pass real ACID2 test?

Internet Explorer 8のBeta版、2008年前半にリリース タグ : Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone (IEBlog) While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better. We will have...

Awesome. Great news, and sincere congrats for that development.

This is awesome news!!! Thank you so much.

Very glad to see some news about IE8, I can't wait to hear more, please keep us posted. However...

"we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly."

Bzzzt, WRONG!

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx

"It's good that IE is finally catching up to Opera.  Let's see if Firefox follows suit..."

Firefox has been able to do that since december 2006.. internet explorer 8 is the 4th browser beeing able to render this test correctly

In other news:

Opera 9 and I think 8 passed this aswell...

Looks like Safari 3 doesn't.

Well done, IE team. Better very very late than never. Does this mean that *all* future IE releases will be compliant with the standards as defined at the time of development or can we look forward to a similar timescale for CSS3 support (when CSS3 is actually agreed, anyway)?

awesome guys... and thanks! Appreciate this a lot.

Great progress :) This is very good. I am editor of some websites and I am VERY tired of using mye budget on errorfixing because of bad standards support. Lets hope MS makes it easy and necessary for people to upgrade. Push IE8 hard please! Play the climatecard and calculate how standardsupport means less development time that leads to less heating/cooling of the office and so on.

I can't believe it!!

congratulations IETeam! I will be very happy with the advantages that this release bring to us, the webelopers.

Thanks to take our demands into consideration :)

You can't imagine how happy this makes me. I am creating a modern public web application for schools in Sweden. We spend a lot of time debugging problems and dumbing down the application for Internet Explorer and other broken browsers.

Internet Explorer 7 was a step in the right direction, but in reality it just added one more quirky browser to the list of browsers we have to support.

Therefore this early information on Internet Explorer 8 is very good news. I hope Microsoft will be very aggressive in pushing updates to users so we can drop support for IE6 and 7 quickly.

Thank you guys! This has given me hope for the future of the web.

Regards,

Martin Olsson

In case you haven't noticed, the Acid 2 page is borked right now. No browsers are "passing" at the moment.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172

I don't care about that test much. I mean, it has invalid CSS in it. So what, if IE8 passes it.  I would be a bit more concerned to know if they didn't modify it specifically just to pass this test :)

A bit ironic how the Acid2 test page breaks right when the IE team announces it finally passes it. :p

(In other words, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3 all fail the test currently, due to a temporary problem with the page)

Anyway, I'm glad this finally happened... No matter what else you decide to add to IE8 later on, I hope you'll seriously encourage IE6 and 7 users to upgrade to IE8 (more so than you tried to push IE7), so as to end web developer nightmares as soon as possible.

Thanks, and congratulations! :)

Eivind.

> We have a responsibility to respect the work

> that sites have already done to work with IE.

You can respect the extra work you have forced so many of us to do through your combination of illegal monopoly abuse and poor standards support by never putting us in that position again.  Passing Acid2 is a good step in the right direction for Internet Explorer, but you still seem to be stepping a lot more slowly than other browser developers, so as long as IE-bundling keeps your market share high, Microsoft is single-handedly holding back the development of the entire Web.

If it speeds up development and hastens the release of IE 8, I would be happy and even grateful to see every IE-6-specific Web page in the world render differently under the new version in the name of standards support and interoperability.  Encouraging the Web developers and publishers of the world to revise their offerings to support standards would be a *GOOD* thing for consumers and producers alike, so why perpetuate non-standard, non-interoperable Web development by continuing to support it?

I would hereby like to put in a vote for supporting

box-sizing: border-box

Border-mox makes creating multi-column layouts so much easier that it almost makes me put IE in quirks mode ;)

@Philipp Lenssen

> Maybe it's one of those every 4 versions thing? Internet Explorer 4 also blew Netscape 4 away when it came to standards-compliance

Why the "also"? IE8 isn't on a path to blow anything away here, only on a path to finally catching up to others.

@James

> Really, what's your point?

That safari 3 now works on windows?

@Lee

> This is good news. I've never heard of the Acid2 Face before, but just noticed (as have others) that Firefox 2 fails it

It does, but the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3 (currently available as Firefox 3 beta 2) passes.

@Adam Williamson

> This is great news, but that "in IE8 standards mode" worries me. What is this "standards mode"?

@Tino Zijdel

> What exactly is "IE8 standards mode", is it yet another rendering method that we would have to do something special for to trigger?

@James Jones

> Yes... I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, too, and I bet that "IE8 standards mode" is the shoe.

Holy crap on a stick, are you guys for real? Are you web developers or just troll? Cause if it's the former I strongly suggest that you learn about your field, your knowledge is obviously lacking.

@cwilso

> @Tino Zijdel: more detail on "IE8 standards mode" in a soon-to-come post.  And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode.  :)

Not just other browser vendors, any modern browser including but not limited to Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE6 and IE7.

@jodie

> Amazing news, although it is about 5 years late, good news non the less!

There was no ACID2 test 5 years ago. Nice try, no sugar.

@ Aleksey V lazar

> many IE issues are not CSS-related.

So what? Should IE devs stop working on CSS supports even though the vast majority of the community has been asking them to fix that for years?

CSS is a major issue for MSIE right now period.

> I honestly think that this whole affair with IEBlog and talking with developer community, etc., is a bunch of public relations B.S. The fact that they are touting the Acid 2 test is just proof of this.

Is that a joke? Every single other browser publically spoke on Acid2 pass when they managed it. In fact, Dave Hyatt blogged almost daily in April 2005 when they were fixing Webkit's CSS engine for ACID2 pass.

ACID2 is a milestone of CSS2 support, an important and well-known one at that. It's a *good* thing we were updated on the subject.

> I have Firefox 3 Beta 2, and the Acid 2 test page doesn't render correctly. Is it just me?

No, that's because there currently is a bug on the ACID2 page. There's an <object> linking to some other page, that page should not exist (should 404) but for some reason it now sends 200, which breaks the smiley guy.

The test's broken (hyatt officially said so, and he's the one who created ACID2 in the first place), not FF.

@Mike

> For you firefox 3 fanboys you may want to check again Firefox 3 Beta 1 is no longer compliant.

You fail :(

@Derek Kent

> This really does need to be automatic (such as, if a DocType is defined, use the "standards compliant" mode).  Otherwise it becomes an extremely promising change that just fails to deliver in the end.

That's usually what "standard mode" is about you know (look up quirks mode standard mode), they have no reason to do otherwise.

@michael

> Acid2 is NOT a standards compliance test.

yes it is a test of several features. Not a complete standard compliance test by any mean, but a test worth using and passing nonetheless.

> It is a test to see how well your browser takes non-compliant CSS, so that it is rendered consistantly.

Error handling is part of the CSS spec, and is only part of what ACID2 tests for.

This is great news - I hope you're planning to include some of the key new web standards, like HTML5 elements.

The most important things in my opinion are CANVAS, SVG, better CSS support, more DOM support, and support for the newer versions of JavaScript.

VIDEO could wait as Firefox 3 won't have it, but it'll be important in a year or so.

Excellent work guys. Well done.

Great thing, absolutely fantastic to read about this right before christmas. Maybe you guys in redmond might still get back in line ;-)

Great news on the Acid 2 thing, but as a Linux user, and given that you're crowing about standards-compliance, I have to award you inverse kudos for making the video Silverlight-only. No way I can see it. If it was mpeg4 or ogg or Flash, on the other hand...

Congratulations, you passed a two-year old semi-test, that shows you've gotten a few of the "wishlist" items to work correctly.

Now, if you can pull off actual and full CSS2.1 and DOM3 support, I might be impressed.

I can't believe it!

Also please don't forget XP: make the distribution of IE8 as wide as possible, we all need it.

This is very good news. I'm hoping in the future it will allow me to spend less time trying to develop cross browser compliant CSS and Javascript.

Year5.org -- March on the 5th Anniversary of the War Help Make History on the 5th Anniversary of the War - March on DC, March 15th 2008. (tags: march15 2008 antiwar demonstration answer march dc washingtondc war anniversary) CSS Text Wrapper Will likely

all ie users must thank FIREFOX!

if there was no competition from FF, ie users will still be using ie6! microsoft develops ie only when there is a direct compition.

ie1-ie6 competition from netscape!

sleep of 3 years

ie7-ie8 competition from Firefox!

This is the very best news of the year!

Thanks for making the web more interoperable and standarized

Which is great. But I wonder what, if any, interesting new things layout hackers or Dean Edwards can work out about the internals of IE from the list of touched files in the IE Blog blogpost?...

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

¿Microsoft standard? Incredible...

www.juzamdjinn.blogspot.com

Does IE8 grok application/xml+xhtml yet?

A Brief Introduction to REST (tags: REST API development) Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone The internal build of IE8 passes the Acid 2 test. Wait, hang on, IE 8!? (tags: browsers css Microsoft)...

I think this is great news. A huge step in the right direction. Any chance of making IE8 a critical update? So we don't have to cater for IE6 anymore.

You are right I can't run XP and IE 6 forever.

www.apple.com/getamac

But I think I have found a better OS.

I'm Josh, and I'm soon to be a switcher.

Plue says: http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb274/steppres/ieerror.jpg

is more like it!

@Rob

"And so it continues.  The endless posts by people who claim to be "developers" and praise this announcement but, instead, only show what they don't know.

Passing Acid2 means nothing. (...)"

That sounds both arrogant and ignorant.

As far as I am concerned, it means at the very least that generated content (:before, :after) is finally supported, and that alone is quite nice.

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test!

Well, that's nice. And unexpected.

Two comments though.

First, how about XHTML? Do we get support for that as well?

And second, I think you guys are overestimating the impact of extreme "backwards compatibility".

Once upon a time (say, 6 years ago), a browser that didn't emulate 90% of IE6's bugs just wasn't usable. Back then, you *had* to be backwards compatible. No doubt about that.

Today? Well, you need to realize that 99% of the web has actually been cleaned up quite a bit. Pretty much every website works with Firefox and Opera, which *don't* provide accurate backwards compatibility with IE6. (The only sites I've seen that don't work with them are 1: Windows Update, and 2: Netbanking (both due to ActiveX, rather than HTML rendering issues)

What does that tell us? Virtually all sites *already* work without backwards compatibility.

Of course, a lot of sites have hacked in a separate IE codepath, using various hacks to detect the browser version so they can generate the faulty code that IE expects.

But the important thing is, if you're not IE, then sites are already able to serve and be rendered with reasonably standards-compliant (non-IE6) code.

Perhaps that's what's fooling you. Of course if you make a browser that follows the standards, but uses the same id string as IE6/7, then a lot of sites will fail, because they'll assume they need to serve the broken hacked-together version of the site since your browser name is IE. And that might make backwards compatibility seem more important to you than it is.

For the rest of us, well, we don't *need* IE6 compatibility. We haven't needed that for years, ever since Firefox started gaining popularity. Sites just work with non-IE browsers, so you can't "break the web" by fixing those old bugs. That would imply that people using Firefox or Opera are surfing a "broken web", and that's certainly not the case.

IE isn't a important as it was. It's time even Microsoft faced this. Sure, it's the most popiular browser (for various more or less fair reasons), but it no longer dictates how sites should be rendered, and compatibility with past IE versions is no longer such a big deal.

You mean it now shows the reference image properly!? ;)

I can't believe it...

Op deze glorieuze dag heeft het IE team namelijk succesvol Internet Explorer een Acid2 pagina laten renderen

Momentan ist der Internet Explorer 8 in Entwicklung und schon gibt es in Richtung Standards Compliance

Kudos on the Acid2 test, big milestone, you should all be proud.  

I do have a question though, it would be on my IE8 wishlist to have direct .NET compatibility, whereby you could create IE extensions directly in .NET without having to do all the COM interop.  Is this likely to happen.  It would be great if IE8 had a sandbox .NET environment to build into :D

The CSS2 display:table-cell support in IE8 is GREAT news! Thank you. Will it crawl into IE7 too?

Internet Explorer 8 supera il test Acid2: un evento storico!

If you are going to keep a backward compatibility, then let the website developers somehow switch this web-standards mode on.

Good news! Congratulations!

Now if you could support SVG as well it would be very cool. Yours' is the last browser not supporting natively. I keep my fingers crossed ...

The test is compromised since Opera and Firefox do not pass it and IE8 does. Tell us, IE developers, how much did you pay to the acid2 authors for the modification for your browser only?

Okay, thanks for the file list, now where can I download the beta? Not that I don't believe what you say or anything...

Great, when Firefox 6 is out and rendering Acid4 in 2012, IE8 will STILL be 5 years behind the times.

To those of you that claim the test is compromised: Note that the check-in was made on December 14th. There were no reports of Acid2 being broken before several days after that, so even if they *had* done it, there's no reason for the test to still fail (after all, we "normal people" can't verify it ourselves).

You might also want to look into what is actually different between the version on the Acid2 page, and the working version that was posted a link to from a Mozilla bug report: An <object> tag uses a different domain for the data-attribute, and has a few less blank lines (in fact, the same bug report states that the problem is caused by the server returning an incorrect status code for that object). That's not enough to cause a big difference like this.

For those complaining that the Acid 2 test is no longer working... It is a bug on the webstandards site. The 404 error message on their site is returning 200 response code.

Ian maintains a secondary copy on his site. http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/

This copy seems to be working as expected in all browsers including IE8.

Woah! Congratulations guys, that’s fantastic news. Well done.

You say in the channel 9 video that if you change the UA string and feed content to IE that was supposed to be for, say, Firefox that it renders better than in IE.

Can't you just tweak the UA string then? Any old sniffers will still work with old browsers, but won't affect the new browser.

Also: can we get a public bug tracker please? Another thing I'd love to see is a good debugger for seeing what IE is balking on when I feed it my code, akin to the error console on Firefox.

&#924;&#953;&#945; έ&#954;&#964;&#945;&#954;&#964;&#951; &#949;ί&#948;&#951;&#963;&#951; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#954;ά&#955;&#949;&#963;&#949;

Awesome news !

Congratulation guys.

Les développeurs d'IE 8 étaient jusqu'à présent très silencieux. Ils se sont réveillés récemment et ont

Thanks guys. I think I feel a glimmer of hope!

@Code is poetry

It's been over a year that Firefox (trunk) passes the Acid2. Try to get your facts straight before misinforming people.

I hope you will release rendering engine standalone for pre-XP systems!

Good stuff!

Any news on SVG capabilities?

Thanks

Great work. IE8 should be Vista only.

Any chance IE8 will better the support for two-letter domain names in cookies? Perhaps using some of the already known methods which most other browsers use?

Excellent News perhaps the CSS only popout menus on my web site will work in IE8.  They have worked in Gecko engine for awhile now, but not in IE. (Actually they did work one of the IE 7 betas, but then they broke again.)

now could you address the whole issue of needing to detect the browser and send javascript code down different paths to achive the same effects?

Okay... I know it&#39;s definitely slower than most folks would like it to be, but the curtain is slowly

Вы мудаки и пидарасы, выпускаете очередное убожество

Поубивать вас пидарасов !!!!!!

Wow, amazing milestone! Now pack it with faster tabbed browsing, a better interface unlike v7, built in mouse gestures and adblocker, compatibility with Firefox addons and I might... might switch.

Echoing the laundry list of user requests, I'd love to see you guys introduce an event to support showModalDialog (KB251128).

Thanks for your effort.

Just a question from many web developers:

will you drop the support to the hasLayout property? This surely helps, instead of having

two different layout engines on the same

browser.

thanks again.

Gabriele

ps. if you support generated content, see

http://www.css-zibaldone.com/test/#generate

when are they thinking of launching it...?

Awesome. This is great news. Is there any chance we'll be able to run 8 side by side with 7, without using hacks or virtualization?

Good news for IE users ;)

Competion between navigators will continue then !

Here : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480

we can see that all browsers no longer pass the test. Because there is an issue on the server hosting the test.

So, if IE8 passes the test.. then it don't passes the test. When the IE team did the screenshot... ? :)

Dudes! That's sweet! I'd just been wondering what you were up to with IE8... and I'm thrilled to see you've passed this interoperability milestone.

Keep on blogging...

Will IE8 also support RFC 2397?

All other browsers already do. Would be great if this would be compatible, too...

ill pay 400 dollars for vista ultimate ok

id pay over 1000 dollars for vista starter edition without ie (just to get an idea of how much id like to not have ie)

if there was a way to remove ie id pay for it

Congratulations team, that was quite a surprise!

SVG could open up a whole new range of development on the web.

Is it possible to have a screenshot of ACID2 with this page http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/ ?

The other server (official) is no longer valid, since early december.. maybe earlier.

"For those complaining that the Acid 2 test is no longer working... It is a bug on the webstandards site. The 404 error message on their site is returning 200 response code."

There are no bugs on a webstandards site. It's clearly the "new standard" you must all measure yourselves by and support. They're infallible in a Pope-ian way like that, you see.

Can I request a feature? I will do it anyway...mkae the Search bar movable....Thanks.

AC,

New standard?!  Acid2 was changed and IE8 passes it all of a sudden?!  Something is starting to smell funny here.

It's good to see this work done, but it would've been better to have twice as many posts with half as much in them. Let us know what your next milestone is and the progress being made on it. This is great news and I myself am happy to hear it, but it doesn't quite cover the bitter taste of all the silence up to this point.

Let us know what work is being done on the DOM.

Let us know that JScript is finally going to become JavaScript/ECMA compliant.

Let us know all the CSS2 things that have been fixed and what CSS3 things are being considered for addition.

Let us know the direction you're taking IE and what progress has been made even if it's just making baby steps this week.

Any information about IE heading in the right direction is good information. With how much catch up IE has to do and how well documented the standards are it's not like working towards them is something that needs to be done in secret.

Make sure IE8 isn't Vista only too. I know too many people personally who would view it as the last straw and leave MS products entirely for Linux or Mac, and given their wide diversity I imagine that a Vista only IE8 would cost more customers than even MS can afford to lose.

Good job in doing what was expected by people for years. I was completely siding with Opera in their claims in front of the EU, having a major market share in browsers should force you to abide to the W3C standards more than anybody else, otherwise you are creating de facto standards.

Let's hope for you that you will continue in this path...

Wow... and now, exterminate IE6!

That is indeed a milestone. Congrats!

This is Good News.

Note to  簡德瑞: I also just noticed the failure of Moz3 and Safari3 and Opera9 on the acid2 test. Here's a picture: http://tinyurl.com/2o4u3e

As to UI: I agree with the poster above who noted that if you don't know what's wrong with the IE7 UI already, you're not a competent UI person. If I were a 'softie hiring for the IE UI team, it'd be one of my early interview filtration questions. Please have someone take some good long looks at Opera/Safari/FF/IE6, and then at least give us large chunks of UI customization controls for IE8. For example, a UI that allows for emulation of all of those other browsers' UI would be indicative of strength in this area.

-- stan krute

Thank you for posting this, and for including the reality check "Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor." I would highlight, underline, italicize, and bold this for everyone if I could. Technology standards, on the whole (there are exceptions), are not handed down from on high by a benign & benevolent science fiction writers imagining new ideas for vendors to implement. Standards, more often than not, evolve from successful prototypes, not the other way around. Although new features do creep in, the specifications tend to be proposals for *unifying* already existing, disparate ideas that have been tested in the marketplace. Sometimes the standards process doesn't keep up with advances or entrenchment of de facto standards, and sometimes it jumps ahead and reality never catches up, for one reason or another -- often just for backward compatibility with / to minimize disruption of a massive deployed base among Microsoft's paying customers. Yet in either case, it's not the end of the world. It just seems like it is when people try to write code compatible with newer browsers that were designed mostly against the standards.

That said, the IE team has had a very long time to make what seem like small changes to bring their flagship into better compliance, which would've been beneficial for Microsoft and IE, but other priorities prevailed, and now you can't post anything positive without getting a firestorm of criticism and dismissive "too little too late" / "you already proved you don't care about us" comments. Only when IE8 is widely deployed (2010?) will we see whether these changes really make a difference. By then, there might be some other perceived shortcomings that undermine your efforts. In the meantime, the complaints and negative publicity will continue.

Stanley Krute, can you please read the comments before yours ? You said : "I also just noticed the failure of Moz3 and Safari3 and Opera9 on the acid2 test". Yes, of course, the test is broken...

So IE8 doesn't passed the test (until we got a real proof _this_ day).

This is good news, and I think you guys should work on reaching a sooner release date for IE8.

You want to make developers happy? Then force people using IE6 to upgrade. Now. You know darn well that they should not be using it, so go on, do us all a favor (already).

Milestones still left:

1. Public bug tracking interface

2. Ability to run different versions of IE side-by-side, and not use a time-locked image of Windows (come on, how convenient do you really think that is?)

So you passed a test. Whoopie. To paraphrase Deon Sanders when talking about the 2007 Miama Dolphins finally winning a game: So what? They did what they were supposed to do.

You all are celebrating something that has been done to death by every other single web browser out there. The IE team is just now starting to catch up, and the whole world is supposed to throw them a ticker-tape parade? Puh-lease.

Oh no! My negativity is going to force the IE team to not tell us anything substantial in the future!!! How is that any different than now or before? Can't miss what we've never really had.

I would be impressed if the IE team actually turned out a web browser that didn't force me to run three different computer systems, or some jacked-up/hacked-up copy just so I can make sure that a stupid little div didn't just break my entire website (W3C compliant or not).

Of course the community is bitter. You kick us in the teeth with every version release, turn your backs on us when we beg for help, and then act like you're some messiah because you passed some stupid little test that has no real-world application.

That's awesome! Congrats!

Now all we need is something comparable to firebug, and some javascript error messages that actually mean something, and we'll be all set (great start though).

As Josh said: Please, please, please make IE8 a part of XP SP3 and the next Service Pack for Vista so that people are forced to upgrade.

And please let IE8 switch to the standards compliant mode even if there's an XML declaration if the doctype is HTML 4 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict...

Apart from that I'm glad about every single change towards more standards compliance.

“Note, however, that Microsoft have said that they will require authors to opt-in to use the IE 8 standards mode. How they will do this remains unknown, but it is possible that the Acid 2 test will not qualify. This means that IE 8 may not actually pass the Acid 2 test unless it is changed to include the new trigger, whatever that may be. This would mean that it fails the test. Even if they add a special hack to allow the Acid 2 test to pass when hosted on its current server, that will also constitute a fail, since the idea is that the test will pass no matter where it is hosted. If the real test does not produce a pass when hosted on any server or stored locally, then this page will treat it as a fail."

Wow ...join the club, it's about time.

By the way, I'm just another happy Firefox user.

@Moritz Baumann and the others: "force people to upgrade"? How lame is that? How about force the to delete Windows and install Linux (or, even better, get a mac!)

Internet Explorer: you're days are numbered.

In regards to keeping compatibility with existing website; how will this affect the strict doctype. Will rendering bugs while in strict mode be addressed, or will they be kept due to compatibility issues?

What I'd really hope for is that strict rendering is updated to keep with the standards even if some sites might break. And leave the backwards compatibility for the transitional mode. (quirks mode)