IEBlog

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

jacek@okno.n9ery.com

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)

@Andrei Stoleru: Linux and Mac are nice, yeah, but try to be a little realistic. Everyone won't leave Windows all of a sudden for no reason.

A forced upgrade to IE8 would probably be good for both webmasters and IE users.

I wish IE8 would be included in XP SP3, too... But won't SP3 be ready long before IE8 ?

Per chi non lo conoscesse l'Acid2 &egrave; uno dei test pi&ugrave; affidabili per verificare l'aderenza dei browser agli standard, in particolare per ci&ograve; che riguarda il Per ora l'unico browser in grado di superare tale test &egrave; Opera ( F

Congrats, you guys have been pretty quiet, but apparently very very busy.

Acid2 may not be the definititive test, but it certainly is a major milestone along the way.

More standards compliance is always an excellent thing.

I'm looking forward to IE8! (any chance you'll natively support svg so I don't have to move to firefox when I need that?)

Wow.  My mind is blown.  And the same day as a Duke Nukem Forever trailer, no less.  Bravo.

Just remember that acid2 tests a particular set of edge cases; it's not a compliance test, and doesn't mean much if the rest of the renderer isn't up to snuff.

Congratulations! Now since it is that season of the year, here are my wishes:

Get yourself a bug tracker like every other open source project has! The real thing! No more KBs!

Support SVG natively like Opera, Firefox and Konqueror do! Raster gfx are out! Drop VML. VML is definitely not a standard. Just a lame excuse. And remove it from OpenXML, please. Don't ruin your chances for ISO. Use SVG.

Don't switch to quirks mode if an xml-declaration with encoding parameter precedes the doctype declaration.

Support generated content, like Opera and Firefox do. It's very useful for styling notes, list items and hyperlinks.

Implement a real full-screen mode, like Opera does. Opera presentation mode is way cool.

Great to see some competition again. Keep up the good work!

Congratulations!  Now how about moving on to some other W3C standards: SVG, SMIL, XForms, XBL...

I'll believe it when I download it.

But if this is true, Microsoft will have earned some respect for IE, instead of scorn. Thanks for promissing this at least.

"IE8 standards mode"

this seems to be very careful phrasing.

could you explain why you chose to use this phrase rather than just "standards mode" ?

is "IE8 standards mode" something different than just using a proper doctype and valid code?

does one invalidating error (say as caused by included content from a CMS or something) cause the browser to go in to "IE 6 Quirks Mode" all over again?

in other words: will this matter in the wild?

Good stuff.  Now can you stop misleading your customers into thinking that IE is the only browser, or that IE is "the web"?

Thanks ;)

@sw

"Support generated content, like Opera and Firefox do. It's very useful for styling notes, list items and hyperlinks."

This is already in, else it couldn't pass the Acid2 test.

And of course, I'm also all for native SVG support in IE... I'm very interested in it, and will end up using it sooner or later.

Hopefully microsoft sticks to the w3 standards this time, microsoft has driven me crazy with all the hacks for ie6 and 7. Please finaly launch a proper working browser this time.

Listen to the developers and do things right!

Chris Corwin,

"IE8 Standards Mode"

Yes, that caught my eye, too.  I don't know what that means either.  With Microsoft, you always have to question everything.

The beta has no firm release date yet, but it has already passed the Acid2 Browser Test, ensuring that

If only you had started listening earlier, could have saved a lot of years of pain. Well, better late than never. Congrats - this is most encouraging.  

It looks like you have granted my first (and most critical) wish for IE8, and I'm so happy to hear it. I certainly hope this test is passed as a result of standards compliance, and not just gearing your renderer towards showing the right thing to benchmarks. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new browser and trying it out now that I've seen this.

I have only two other things to ask:

1) Please, please, please, PLEASE release this browser as a critical update for everything back to Win2K. We really need to get every Windows user on this newest version for the impact to be felt.

2) Once you've caught up to the pack, keep IE current. All your work to date will quite literally be for nothing if you allow the new browser to languish for 6 years like IE6 did, hobbling developers and slighting users.

Thanks again IE Team, enjoy your holidays, and please keep up the hard work.

Et xforms ? svg ? vont-ils être supportés en natif par ie8 ?

As a web designer I'm really please to hear this news. However, I can't for ie8!!!

Can't you roll out the new engine as quickly as possible in ie7.5, for the sake of fixing the web.

This will also give time to have pages rendering correctly under standard XHTML/CSS spec without any special ie8 only code additions.

It also means we can scrap any ie7.0 fixes when 7.5 is released as it should be an auto update.

ie6 is a concern too. When i build websites, they're all sitting in their office looking at them on ie6, which is hellish!!! Maybe a render engine update for ie6 as well if possible?

No exclusive IE8 tags to make it render correctly either. Just make the web work as it should. It's about time people started to upgrade anyway.

5O WH4+? Ie 1s @nd WILl 83 4 CR4ppY brOW53r.

if( ACID2 == TRUE)

useFakeSmileyRender();

else

useNormalCrappyCSSParser()

Yes! Nice to see! I hate having to write different CSS sheets for each browser.

I now use IE7Pro to mimic what FireFox v2 has for IE v7. I love it. I would love these features to be in IE v8, crash recovery, in-line find, spell checking (for bloggers and forum monkeys), A duplicate tab and open last closed tab feature.

Thanks!

En nära vän frågade mig idag om det hade hänt något nytt på webbstandardfronten på sistone, och den första tanken om for genom mitt huvud var"hur i hela friden skall jag kunna sammanfatta det här i några korta meningar".Det enda...

congrats. this is really exciting. sadly, Acid2 didn't pass on my mac firefox.

Smiling Acid2 face = smiling Developer face. Thanks for the good news.

Given the number of requests for svg here, can we atleast get a yes or no on svg support? I know we can't expect a lot of detail but give us something guys....

Uh, I can´t belive it :-) It´s good news.

My sincere congratulations for your hard work.

I hope you (i.e. you IE developers) are allowed to continue along these lines.

Im sorry, I thinking this is terrible news!  Now MS wanst to bow to presure to whiny dvelopers?  W3 has no busines telling MS what to do...

...!

terrible!

Congratulations! You probably have redeemed a LOT of karma for IE as a whole based solely on this achievement :)

shock shock shock!

can't believe ;-)

My response and a suggestion for Chris Wilson on how to trigger standards mode in IE8, best wishes and luck with all the work everyone is doing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N19ouRblPjE

Also please feel free to test IE8 on my site. I've got plenty of bandwidth so burn it up all you want! You can disable the secondary stylesheet intended to patch rendering issues by using the ?browserpatch=0 or ?ieccss=0 HTTP queries...

http://www.jabcreations.com/home/home-news.php?browserpatch=0

Thanks for the post!

ATTENTION IE8 DEV TEAM:

Currently the Acid2 Test on http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html is broken.

Check here for reason: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c176

Reason: Quote "James Justin Harrell"

"What changed that broke the test?

It looks like an object element that's pointing to a non-existent page

(http://www.webstandards.org/404/) should be falling through, but that page is

now returning a response status of 200 (success) instead of 404. Was it

previously correctly returning a 404 response?

Perhaps this test should be hosted on a separate server, instead of coexisting

with a live site like WebStandards.org, so that future mishaps like this don't

happen."

IE8 Devteam look into this. This might meddle with your current flow. Try taking the Acid2 test here: http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/

If you are already aware of this and IE8 still passes the test, then i would say HURRAY! :D

"Microsoft announced Wednesday it has passed an early milestone for the next version of its iconic Internet

Any idea of the canvas tag will be implimented in IE8? I would very much like to know this.. it is supported in all other major browsers. Google has a bandaid for current IE to make the canvas tag work, but is very slow and not the same as a real hard-coded canvas tag.

&quot;Microsoft announced Wednesday it has passed an early milestone for the next version of its iconic

Congratulations guys,

As you have said, this is first milestone, there are still issues there will have to be resolved, such as Javascript and HTML speed, multi pipelining and such. Still as start, good work.

Ofcourse Firefox guys who actually thinks it already passes test should re-test their beta2 again.

That's fantastic!

Does this mean IE8 handles "margin: 0 auto;" correctly now?

cwilso said: "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.  :)"

Yes Chris, I know, but that's not what I meant. I was asking what it would take for webdevelopers to get that same behaviour in IE8. The talk here about "not breaking backwards compatibility" does suggest some kind of opt-in switch (as you've suggested yourself before), which I feel is something that doesn't help interoperability and punishes authors that are trying to do the right thing.

How about the possibility to run IE8 alongside IE7/6? That would partly solve the backwards-compatibility problem (people can revert to an older version of IE, especially for intranet apps that are known to rely heavily on IE quirks and proprietary features), and as an extra bonus it would be a huge benefit for authors that for years to come will still have to cater for older versions of IE.

Secondly I wonder what is meant by "the right set of standards". Will IE8 only implement subsets of some standards, or implement some standards as a whole and dismiss some others? How about DOM and JavaScript? How about CSS3 features that are already CR? How about upcoming features from HTML5 such as <canvas> that already have support in other browsers?

Although it is good to have news about IE8 this post leaves more questions than answers.

Passing Acid2 is no assurance that IE does much of anything different than it does now.

Not to be rude, but Acid2 is not a COMPLIANCE test, it is a FAILURE test.

It shows that the browser processes BAD HTML and CSS code nicely.  That it fails in such a way as to leave the page readable.  If a browser "fails" the Acid2 test, it means that when it encounters bad HTML/CSS, it barfs up the page rather than failing nicely.

Yes, it's nice to know that IE8 will "pass", but I'd rather make sure that pages with PROPER HTML/CSS code are rendered nicely, without requiring IE-specific workarounds, as it common now.  There are many websites, including very major ones, where code is hand-tuned so that "correct" HTML/CSS is bypassed when IE is detected, because IE is known to not render it correctly.

What I would like is for pages to "Let iCab smile", with no browser-specific code, to render correctly on IE.

First of all, congratulations to Microsoft. Of Acid2 is not everything, but this is a strong sign that you are committed to improving standards compliance.

> Selcuk

Please read Melianor's message, which is slightly above yours. The site that Acid2 is hosted on has changed and now the test is invalid. This is a recent development, but until it is fixed, the test will need to be taken on another server. (Hopefully Microsoft retests their implementation against the right test.) Both FF3 Beta 1 and 2 pass Acid2 without any problems.

Congratulations Microsoft. This is the first post from this blog that's put a smile on my face, that's two in one day:).

1.  NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH IE7'S NON-CUSTOMIZABLE UI. VERY FEW USERS ARE ACTUALLY HAPPY WITH IT.

2.  CONSIDERING THE SPEED AT WHICH EVERYTHING HAPPENS, (IE is updated/released and adopted by the people), MS please get your standards support WAY UP in 1-2 versions, otherwise practically it'll still take years (2010 at least) before the headache is over. Please stop overstating the significance of "not breaking the web". Getting people to adopt the newer IE versions is much more difficult and slower than developers updating their respective web sites, so Microsoft's priority should be to get standards support as high as possible with the next 2 versions itself.

3.  In their effort to keep XP and Vista growing, MS is not taking any effort for wide-deployment of IE8 and later except Windows Update. Please please release a last final IE8 for Windows 98SE/Me and Windows 2000 SP4 although 9x's support has ended. Please make the required architectural changes you did for XPSP2/Vista to Windows 2000 and 9x/Me or ship a separate special IE8 for those, just get the layout engine in those OSes fixed. Opera 9 STILL runs on Windows 95 and Firefox 2 also runs on Win9x, FF3 will also run on Windows 2000.

I just happen to think of something.  This is NOT IE8 that passed this test.  This isn't even IE8 Beta.  Not even IE8 Alpha.  This is some internal build that they made pass the test.  

This is NOT the build you will use.  This is NOT the build that Beta will use; perhaps not even Alpha.

Here's the question, Dean.  Will IE8 Release pass Acid2 whenever it comes out?

Returning for a moment after a long while… Thanks :) This makes the web developer in me quite happy!

I do quite agree with what the comment “Thursday, December 20, 2007 10:01 PM by anonymous” says; I too like applications that fit in my GUI (I typically use the classic theme in XP, but currently a Zune inspired one, for example — neither of which is really something IE7 would fit in).  And I also would love to see Win2k support at least — it was an awesome OS (if not the best ever to come from Microsoft), and there are a lot of people still using it for various reasons.

Anyway; thanks for getting the Acid2 right :)  Also fun to see some source file names, that doesn’t happen often!

If the adoption rates for IE8 are going to mirror the ones of IE7 it's going to be looong wait before most of the public is going to install a decent browser from Microsoft. Thanks Firefox and Opera for forcing MS to give a rat's behind about "standards" after so many years.

Hey, in software, money can't beat talent and dedication. And you guys have just money.

CSS-hacking or screenshot of this page http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.html ? =)

I m web developer and i hate IE.Now with IE8 hmm...CSS,XHTML,png TRANSPARENCY long shot for windows....keep up good work and good luck with IE8...

Ping Back: http://blogs.dotnethell.it/vincent/IE-Team-annuncia-Windows-Internet-Explorer-8-Beta-1.__12543.aspx

Congrats, Team.

Ping Back: http://blogs.dotnethell.it/vincent/IE-Team-annuncia-Windows-Internet-Explorer-8-Beta-1.__12543.aspx

Thanks Team!

Sounds good, hope to test the beta soon

IE团队高兴的宣称：2007年12月12日星期三，Internet Explorer在IE8标准模式下正确的渲览了 Acid2 测试。支持Acid2所测试的特性们有多种理由，但这是IE团队在IE8中承诺的互操作性，符合标准，向后兼容性中的一个重要里程碑。

כנראה שאיחלנו ליום הזה יותר מדי, היום שבו המשיח יגיע והכל יסתדר , זאב יגור עם כבש אנשים ישליכו את החרבות

IE团队高兴的宣称：2007年12月12日星期三，Internet Explorer在IE8标准模式下正确的渲览了 Acid2 测试。支持Acid2所测试的特性们有多种理由，但这是IE团队在IE8中承诺的互操作性

How about full XHTML compliance with the browser

To hell with old websites, just announce it a year before, so we'll get a Y2K boost in the industry, fixing all broken sites. Make it standards compatible at first go. Let's fix the web :P

Hurray! Two days ago when I read that news on many others blogs I got very happy, because I am a web developer and deal with all the differences really stress me a LOT!

I hope this standard compliance turns things more easy at web programming for all of us!

Finally, I guess Molly's work it was a fundamental contribution to this goal.

See ya,

now do this one

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

this is konqueror's result

http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cssck2.png

Turkish:

Şu İnternet Explorer 8'i çıkarsanızda kullansak! :)

               SDN= MSDN

>this is konqueror's result

The same as Opera 9.5.

Firefox 3 Beta has been able to pass the Acid2 Test since  2006! pfff...

Cool , when do IE6 and 7 will pass the test...

so when IE8 comes out it will finally be where it should have been from the start...when is IE8 coming out?  because i'm thinking being 5 years behind compliance isn't really going to help developers that much.  but i guess i will be able to use those designs i did in 2005 and 2006...just have to sit on them a few more years.  w00t?

just make sure ie8 drops as a critical update again.

somebody from team plz invite me to IE8, i will not tell anyone :D

Microsoft freut sich &uuml;ber einen Meilenstein: Die Version 8 des Internet Explorers hat den Acid2-Test bestanden, was ein etwas kantiger, aber nicht verst&uuml;mmelter Smiley im IE-Blog anzeigt. Webentwickler d&uuml;rfen sich in Zukunft &uuml;ber eine

Will you be doing anything to fix cross site scripting attacks now? After the numerous CSS and Javascript bugs in IE, XSS attacks are probably the most pain to fight.

I suggest adding a meta tag that allows Javascript to be turned off in the body of the page or inline. You'd still be able to load Javascript, from file, in the head of the page, and attach to elements in the body of the page, but no Javascript could be parsed in the body of the page. That'd make it a lot easier to fight XSS attacks without limiting legitimate use.

I have to agree with the poster that said we should be able to charge Microsoft for the extra effort we make to support their faulty products. It's not the same as supporting Firefox, Safari, and Opera because those three all have been far more standards compliant and if one worked, for the most part, all worked.

I found it quite ironic that the very week that IE8 is able to pass the Acid 2 test, is the same week that the test is messed up so that browsers that used to pass it are no longer able to pass the test: Safari Mac/Win, Opera Mac/Win and Firefox 3 Mac/Win.

Anybody else find that odd?

- Highway

Si c'est av�r�, c'est un pas de g�ant qu'Internet Explorer est en train d'accomplir sur le chemin du respect des standards du Web, notamment des CSS. Jugez vous-m�me avec le test Acid2 tel qu'il est pass� par l'actuelle version 7 d'Internet...

Great news , but ..

Question for IE8 devels : will SVG support be in milestones ?

Its on of 'big changes' in upcomming opera's an firefox's releases. Its not a secret that IE has been one which have to chase other browsers. And this yould be one more step for web development techs.

Fine. Now try this on for size. When IE 8.0 finally ships and we find that if and only if it finally adheres to web standards then the developers can stop catering to IE 6.0/7.0 altogether with bright shiny disclaimers on their websites that state; "In order to view this site you need to upgrade your browser to IE 8.0, Firefox 3.0 or Opera". Save yourself a boat load of troubles and start putting all your hard work into one set standard. Like it should have been 5 years ago. This is the 21st century for crying out loud.

I love it.

Thats a good claimed, Cograts.

any hint with Public beta release?

No more ridiculous hasLayout garbage!!!!

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Dec/0151.html

Markus Mielke [MSFT] explains that it was never meant to be exposed.

Now all we need is JS/DOM support to work in IE8, and we can ship it!

IE6 Deprecation.. Here We Come!!!! Can't Wait!

Why does the smiley face at the begining of this post look so bad?  It has the horrible artifacting that JPEGs have, yet the file is a PNG!

Please tell me that posters on this blog know that PNGs are the only way to go for screenshots on this blog, and that converting a JPEG to a PNG doesn't cut it. Or is this some FuzzyType(TM) induced issue?

Otherwise, I'm with all the other commenters on this blog.  Great news that IE has joined the Acid2 club (last member, but better than never), just wish there was some news about the only topic we care about.

DOM Fixes

JavaScript Fixes

Can I prototype yet?, are all the DOM Events, Methods and Properties sorted out yet?

Thanks.

This is very exciting news! Nice work.

Congratulations guys!!! This news has made me really happy. Please don't let that stupid lawsuit from Opera discourage you. You guys have done a great thing for the future of the web. My opinion of Microsoft has just risen several hundred fold. Thank you for this very exciting news - I suspect you've made thousands of new friends!

Congratulations again on what must have been a HUGE amount of work. Impressive stuff.

ie will be standards compliant? say it aint so!

This is heartening news! With the furore this week about the Opera lawsuit, and doom sayers predicting the demise of the W3C, it is great to hear about some real progress being made in the area of web standards. This news will go a long way to convincing web designers/developers that Microsoft is on the right track with IE 8.

pour voir l'effecacité de logiciel

@Roger Gordon: Opera didn't file any lawsuit... ¬_¬

Good news for webmasters. No need to develop css-hacks for I.E. anymore. ;)

That's a photoshopped image!! you can see a lil background at the back of "Hello world!" ;)

@Stifu:

Yes they did.

http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Microsoft_Responds_To_Opera_Lawsuit_11788.html

@Hank:

Nope, they didn't.

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/microsoft-antitrust

L'information est tombée mardi 19 Décembre 2007 sur le Blog IEBLOG, la prochaine version du navigateur de Microsoft devrait passer le test Acid 2

Internet Explorer 8 respectueux des standards ?

Si Microsoft est souvent critiqué (à tord ou à

raison) son navigateur.... http://www.vdp-digital.com/articles/view.php/78/Internet-explorer-8-test-acid2

Please catch up to Firefox, Opera, and Safari with the canvas tag.

Regarding, breaking the internet by actually making IE8 render things properly ... please do. As a developer I would much rather go back and remove my IE hacks from old code than to continue wasting 4 or 5 hours each day getting things to work in Internet Explorer that "just work" in Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Internet Explorer is the primary bottleneck in web development. Period.

PEOPLE: STOP CATERING TO IE6. IT IS DEAD. LET'S MOVE ON.

as for the Acid2 test, congrats :) I just tried it on my IE3.0 (Vista compatible version) and it totally failed, so I'm glad to see you guys are progressing.

Here's to IE8 in 2032 (but hopefully sooner)!

Now, please, PLEASE include this in automatic update of windows,, or wait, maybe is better to wait few, months, years, to see how is working,, haha...

I'm tearing up i'm so happy. Not even kidding. Thanks IE8 dev team.

1.  Pls fix the Q and OBJECT elements.

2.  Take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines

2.  Please support proper XHTML 1.1.

automatic updates didn't make everyone adopt ie7 forcing us to continue to support ie6. for the ie8 rollout i'm expecting armed bill gates look alikes enforcing the upgrade. it's our only hope

Dearest MS, I make a deep wish from the bottom of my heart to please make IE8 available also for Windows 2000, Me and 98SE. This will also entirely change people's opinion of Internet Explorer.

This is amazing then when IE8 comes out in what 2020 -_-.

BRING BACK IE FOR THE MACINTOSH!

@anonymous:

|object| is fixed in IE8 standards mode, else Acid2 would fail.

If i type a url, then switch the focus to other window. Later on i switch back to IE, the "Go" button would change to refresh button. It is a bug or a "design"?... many thx

shame it's going to take years to phase out the other browser versions you didn't bother to make standards compliant in the first place..

sigh.

at least this is a start I guess.

Bringing back IE for the Mac would be a step backwards and a downgrade for the Mac.  It is far better for Mac users to use Safari or Firefox or Opera than to wish for old, buggy non-standard IE8.  

Yes, I wrote that correctly.  IE8 will still be 10 years behind web standards, or more, when it comes out due to its poor or non-support of other web standards, including the DOM, XHTML, Javascript, SVG, etc.

This is a good step to standards and could make webdeveloper's life more easy IE always made thinks the triky way and its just pain in the ass.

The acid2 test means thinks work one way and everyone can hope on result to one implementation and the days of works on IE but else not are dfinished... I hope...

but with Microsoft we never know.

Please listen to the people's requests on this blog.

What is really needed, given that Win2000 is in extended support until 2010, and some corporates will defer upgrading to Vista until then, is to make IE7 and IE8 available for  Windows 2000. Otherwise we're stuck with another 3 years of hacking sites to be IE6-compatible.

@Richard Grevers and anon - They've previously said in comments in other entries in this blog that IE7 support in WinXP SP1 and Win2K would require too much infrastructure overhaul. I doubt they're going to seriously consider destabilizing other parts of Win2K just to update IE there, and they're not going to release a relatively crippled (security-wise) edition of IE7/IE8 just for older platforms.

Software Development is moving in wrong direction. 'features' are dominating 'quality'. Not just one instance, many times IE7 crashes, started using firefox for those sites.(eg moneycontrol.com) still i am not convinced to use firefox for everything. because UI, fonts (esp local languages) looking good only in IE7. But that itself not sufficient. functionality is more importantant than UI.

when people started making quick money and forgot honesty, software dev also goes in that direction only. there is no surprise

if only ie was developed to follow standards, we won't be rejoicing on such minor annoucements like this (minor bec. other browsers and not the leading in terms of number of users have passed this in their final releases already even b4 ie could).

This is not to say that what you have announced is insignificant, but to say that it is only significant bec. ie is not known to really follow the standards....

Flame me, but truth hurts...

I just hope that within the future (starting today) MS and IE Team will strictly follow the standards first before anything else...

Help make our lives as web apps developer easier by making the practice of supporting different behaviours on different browsers a forgotten virtue...

now, that would be good :-)

It looks like you have granted my first (and most critical) wish for IE8, and I'm so happy to hear it. I certainly hope this test is passed as a result of standards compliance, and not just gearing your renderer towards showing the right thing to benchmarks.

I thought I wouldn't live to see this day or probably would be telling this news to my grandchildren.

This is a good sign, look forward to seeing the finished product.

Keep up the flow of information and discussion. Obviously you can never make everyone happy but please keep trying!

Microsoft seems to have learned an important lesson and has started taking acid. Acid2 specifically. They have passed it with flying colors. Finally. Firefox passed it awhle ago... you can see its image here on the right hand side, rendered with fire

Internet decides to reject all IE8 and cancelled for Windows XP.

Special Edition of the Geek News Central Podcast recorded during the 24hr Podcast. All the regular great coverage plus the live components which were a lot of fun. Sponsors: Special Promotion code 20% off on 1 Year Shared Hosting Plans...

#2 public bug tracking

#3 public bug tracking

#4 DOM compliance

#5 JavaScript improvements

#6 IE7 UI Overhaul

#7 UI Overhaul of any UI element from IE6 or earlier that has not been updated

#8 JavaScript Console

#9 JavaScript Console

#10 CSS2 100%

#11 XHTML 100%

#12 SVG

#13 Favorites Overhaul - 504 chars is NOT enough!

#14 Speed improvements - loading a blank tab should take milliseconds

#15 Ability to close single open tab!

#16 Undo Close Tab

#17 Did we mention public bug tracking yet?!

i think i find a bug in IE browser. it been found in IE6 and IE7,but i dont know it's still in ie8.

code:

<div>

<iframe src="a.html"></iframe>

<iframe src="b.html"></iframe>

</div>

if you press Ctrl+F5，IE can be send a right request:

Get a.html...

Get b.html...

but,if you press F5, IE will send a wrong request and recived 304 of Http header,It will be request:

Get a.html...

Get a.html...

if our code like as:

<div>

<iframe src="a.html"></iframe>

</div>

<div>

<iframe src="b.html"></iframe>

</div>

It be work good in IE.

by tonera@gmail.com

Congrats!  Nice to see that, when it comes to the Browser Wars, you folks won't keep trying to bring knives to the gunfight.

if (document.URL == 'http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top') {

document.write('<H2 ID=top>Hello World!</H2>'+

'<IMG SRC=http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.png>')

}

Congrats! Took you long enough.

@James

You had to buy a Mac to test Safari, come on, your a closet Mac lover, just admit it.

Safari has been passing the Acid2 test for just about as long as it has been around. IE has always failed horribly, and ever Firefox doesn't get it right.

Safari is quite compliant thank you very much. (Although I still use Firefox :p)

GREAT!!! It took quite enough time.

Somehow I can't help but being a little skeptical... If it's really true, it's a good new... only 3 or 4 more years of IE hell ahead I guess... ;)

"Safari has been passing the Acid2 test for just about as long as it has been around." - James

...and IE4 was released in September 1997 and unlike say, nightly builds of Safari, you can use your keyboard without a mouse to navigate. :-P

@John A. Bilicki III: yeah, I only just recently noticed that neither Safari or Opera let you do that... (Or not by default, at least)

Pitié .. gardez une compatibilité avec Freewop. Chaque mise a jours entraine une incompatibilité.

The french is the winer

Freewop: that might be because your site is badly coded (100 HTML errors on your index...). IE8 is supposed to be more respectful of standards, so if you site respected standards, then you'd be safe (pretty much).

PS: you meant "winner", not "winer"... Unless you meant "whiner" ? Anyway, that was stupid.

@ Stifu, Since Opera is a standalone application I test the last moderate version (7.0X being 7.11, 8.5X being 8.54 as examples) and Opera starting with version 7 (I test 7.11)  is keyboard accessible. However it has not been until alpha releases of 9.5 that we have seen support for the focus pseudo-element. While not intended for the same reason as focus the active pseudo-element can be used in Internet Explorer 4 for the same behavior which makes it interesting as you can add hover and focus-like behavior by simply placing the non-anchor element within an anchor, presuming it's an inline element by default.

From my work perspective at least Opera seems to take about the same amount of time to add CSS related features as Internet Explorer. Both only support Opacity (more or less) though lack any other useful CSS3 property at the moment (that I'm aware of). For IE8 and Opera 10 to not inherit the same level of undesirability in four or five years respectably we'll need to see a reasonable amount of CSS3 property support added. CSS3 property support is the most redeeming quality of Safari and they're already messing with CSS animation which I have to add 27KB (after compression) of DHTML code. Maybe in ten years we'll see OpenGL and DirectX competing to be adopted for a W3C spec. Imagine the kinds of sweet non-Flash menus we could create then. :-D

@John A. Bilicki III: I never noticed Opera didn't implement focus until 9.5...

On the other hand, I really can't agree with you about Opera's CSS(3) support.

Opera (9.5) supports all of the CSS3 pseudo-selectors, opacity, text-shadow, multiple-backgrounds... IMO, the main things it lacks compared to competitors are border-radius and rgba. (While on the other hand, Firefox lacks text-shadow and multiple backgrounds)

So yeah, it seems like Webkit takes the lead when it comes to CSS3.

IE doesn't even support opacity, you have to use that filter proprietary code instead. There's just no contest between IE and Opera, they're not on the same level.

I am looking forward to the release of IE8.

Here is hoping that Microsoft includes XSLT 2.0 in its next browser.

@Stifu, it still counts especially since technically conditional comments can't be validated (without going to the extent of copying and pasting the address in to the validator). Since it's ignored it's technically ok (for up to this point) to have been proprietary. However since competitors and the W3C have implemented it IE should implement the normal method of using opacity...without removing the proprietary support of course (don't break the web part).

Where/when did Opera 9.5 receive multiple background image support? I have been trying to keep up on such news especially since it's critical to making browsers not suck to work with in the next few years. The border-radius and multiple column layout properties are what would be the main lacking items in Opera 9.5 then. I hope the IE team takes their time to make IE8 come out with a bang, IE needs it.

@John A. Bilicki III: sorry, I was wrong.

Opera doesn't support "regular" multiple backgrounds yet. (Test page: http://stoneship.org/pub/multiplebackgrounds/)

I got mixed up with a similar test, which was about multiple backgrounds using SVG, which only Opera 9.5 passes (http://files.myopera.com/Fyrd/mb/svgmultiple.html).

better late than never.

..oh wait, IE's losing the war.

move along people, nothing to see here.

IE in Win32/? applications

I don't program applications for windows (e.g. VB, Visual Studio type stuff) but I am curious what is embedded when a browser component is added to these applications.

For example, I do make tons of web sites and applications, and I would like to know when other windows based applications load these, are they all loading in the "IE6" rendering engine? or are some of them loading in the "IE7" rendering engine now? or do the applications update the component when a new version comes out? e.g. apps that had an IE6 embedded, are now auto updated to IE7?

I ask for a few reasons. For one, I plan to stop supporting IE6 very shortly, but if win apps rely on it, even though the user has upgraded to IE7, I need to know about this, and  possibly delay my deprecation of IE6.

Secondly, I want to know if from the HTML/CSS/JavaScript side of things, does the browser control behave any different than the IE(6/7) browser? e.g. does the UserAgent String change or anything?

Thanks.

Please support DOM properly....don't simply focus on CSS.

Please fix the 'operatoion aborted' DOM/JS error in IE8. Thanks.

@martin: Applications which embed a WebBrowserControl automatically use the latest version of IE available on the computer.  So, for instance, MS Money will use IE6 components on a computer with IE6, and will use IE7 components on a computer with IE7.

@tonera: To understand more about how IE handles caching, please see http://www.enhanceie.com/redir/?ID=HTTPPERF

Did The Internet Explorer 8 Team Cheat To Pass The ACID2 Test?

@System.Reflection.Emit: Of course not.  ACID2 was passed long before the WSP central test server was misconfigured, and we maintain an internal copy of the test anyway.

@EricLaw

Is there a list of Windows applications that work(ed) with IE6, that no longer work with IE7?

I presume that this is the only "real" reason why users/IT pros haven't updated from IE6 to IE7 (at least on XP)

Thinking about this a little deeper.... not being able to lock in to a certain version of embedded IE, seems to be a flaw in the overall design.

By auto-updating, you put huge pressure on software developers to ensure their apps work long after the browser has been upgraded, and at the same time, you hinder IE's progress, because you always have to cater to old applications that can't handle new features, or updates to the specs that break old IE behavior!

A web site is real easy to fix/adjust... since the code isn't (typically) compiled... but a windows app may live long after the source code is nowhere to be found, or in a sad state.

I really want IE8 to fix all of its issues, but it seems it must be done in a very special way if IE continues to bundle auto-updating controls in windows applications.

The whole browser evolution thing seems very tied down to the underlying Operating System.  If I was a windows application developer, I would be very weary of using IE as a web control in my apps based on the info you provided above!

Watched the first bit of that channel 9 piece of propaganda.  Seems to me that what was said was lip-service to standards, unapologetic BS about it, and an admission of how the ACID2 test was passed.

Namely, that they implemented the bits and fixed the bugs related to this test.  Please note that this test does NOT test full CSS2.1, but only a small subset of it.  So, what this most likely means is that there will still be significant issues with CSS in IE8 (though I'd love to be wrong on this one).

I also fully believe that this move was not about listening to developers.  What I find *far* more likely is that this was done because the Opera CEO stood up in a yahoo talk and showed the embarrassing rendering of the ACID2 test in IE7 (it looked like Opera from literally a decade prior).

So, in one swoop, MS's IE team can talk about supporting standards and listening to developers even though it's likely this is far from the truth, but just a by-product of avoiding further embarrassment.

Nice try.  But, until I see IE at the level of all other major browsers (or making an earnest effort), I'm going to view such tactics as I always do, poorly.

Well although this is a 'milestone' for IE, what does it really mean to the rest of us? Especially us web designers who have had to put up with years of MSIE hacks to get our web sites that are built to W3C standards to look good in IE.

IE7 bought MS a bit closer to a standards goal that browsers such as FireFox, Opera and Webkit have pretty much got to. However, IE7 was still not there.

Do I dare get excited that the days of IE hacks are well and truly over or am I getting ahead of myself?

I know it's a bit off-topic but this blog post has cooled so...

Anyone know of a *working* Windows Messenger status script written in PHP? I have AIM, Yahoo, and even Skype working for my IM tab under contact on my site. I removed my MSN screen name since everyone kept using it as email instead of the email form.

IE Still Sucks But And It Will NOT Save Me Any Time Writing Code Because I Write Code With Total Disregard For IE

So It Sucks Now

Ind It Will Forever

Guess What

IE SUCKS!!!

NEVER USE IT EVER

This Has Been A Public Service Anouncement By Taylor Satula

:)

I honestly don't understand how the IE team is still employed after long, long years of sub par programming even by Microsoft's standards. Ever since IE “one” PC users have been subjected to the type of quality control that the toy industry is now facing with china, and that is to say that the cutting of corners has been amalgamated into corporate policy… I’m sure. What would be fantastic is if the team would stop ignoring the subject of their poor craftsmanship and address some of the major issues that have plagued us for far too long, like security or usability for that matter. Every time for the last fifteen times I have used IE a pop-up tells me to stop running script because it is cause IE to slow down. However I am not running script while browsing Reddit, IE then promptly crashes in an untimely fashion usually clogging my entire system for a solid ten minutes, and at the end of the entire IE ordeal Microsoft feels the need to shove their idiocy in your face by suggesting that the “error Report” is even going to be looked at by Experts. Immigrants with little to no English capability being huddled into a tiny room closing the billions of error reports they receive by the truckload every minute have absolutely no ability to SOLVE your teams insurmountable challenges they now face. In fact less and less PC users are using IE at all simply because crashing wasn’t the main feature they were hunting for. And I’m sure I not only speak for myself but for many web designers who have been forcibly cramped into the IE confines for the latter part of this decade feel that enough is enough. Mozilla Firefox offers a great deal more than IE could have ever dreamed of offering not that says much about Mozilla though, it’s not hard to beat an opponent who tries its best to fail at every opportune moment. And as for Opera it puts both IE and Mozilla to shame with its bountiful array of options versus IE’s (all versions) impressively large collection of errors that force it into a standstill along with your computer. The Windows Blue Screen of death usually follows very close after unless the task manager is consulted for a Process Tree termination which in future startups of the OS degenerate its performance if ever so slightly. So I beg you all at the IE laboratory if one could even have the composure to call it a laboratory; Myself and a Great many ,many ,many others wish you would just forget about IEs existence altogether and focus your attentions on collecting a monthly welfare cheque which is definitely more than what society deserves to give you for your technological contributions. In closing, and in more crass terms than I usually use, your product sucks not because of it itself but because of the incompetence of its creator, clearly if you wanted to take intelligent design into the equation you beyond a shadow of a doubt at the IE team have simply thrown code together in a brash attempt of making it actually do something. Whether or not I like to admit it you succeed in making it do one thing consistently and that is forever pale in comparison to real software.

Today in IE the user has only 2 options....remember a password or don't remember it. While a remembered password can be deleted, if we click "NO", then IE does not prompt any more. The only way to get IE to prompt again FOR THAT SITE is to clear ALL passwords. IE team, pls fix this minor feature in IE8 so that like Firefox "Dont remember now" button is added.

Another feature regarding passwords which Firefox 3 implements is that now it logs in and checks whether the login was successful and only then it prompts to save the password. I guess these minor features can be easily implemented.

1. Please add the ability to close a tab without the need to make it active first.

2. Replace the UGLY mouse wheel scroll icon.

3. Save the window size, always maximize upon launching.

4. Firefox has an option to allow websites to disable right click using Javascript. This does not require Javascript to be entirely disabled/toggled.

5. Please include a MIME file type association handler

6. In Internet Options=>Programs, add a "default Feed Reader" like Calendar, Contacts etc.

7. A full blown UI to manage passwords would be even better. It can be protected via a master password for security.

i just tested ie7 with the acid2 test.. too bad i cant upload images here.. ;-)

Sorry, can't resist after I found out:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/23/ms-explorer-hits-iceberg-cassia

Geez. These comments can mostly be summed up as follows:

* "I use obscure code X and I want it to work, why aren't you guys making it work? MAKE IT WORK".

* "OMG Acid 2!!! IE now passes this one test that means it's going to be the greatest browser evarrr"

* "We want a public bug repository!!! Waaah!"

Can't people look at things objectively any more?

When developing any software, time is finite and so must be allocated cleverly. That means hopefully fixing majority issues. If minority issues get fixed along the way, brilliant.

Acid 2 isn't the be-all and end-all of browser tests. It's nice that it now works, but both IE7 and FF2 seems to be doing just great without it at present.

And finally, maintaining a bug repository is quite a time burden. Especially as many people here seem to be completely insane and will file bug reports ad infinitum. I imagine that for some months all we'd get is a staggering number of duplicate bug reports, or requests for crazy features, or issues that are not bugs. The signal to noise ratio would likely be very high.

Perhaps have a publicly viewable, but restricted access tracker to start with - so people can see what's going on, but not flood the poor system with mess. Then, once people calm down in general, start opening it up.

Remember, think about how these decisions affect others and not just yourself :)

"Acid 2 isn't the be-all and end-all of browser tests. It's nice that it now works, but both IE7 and FF2 seems to be doing just great without it at present."

Either you only just make very simple pages, or we're not using the same version of IE7...

:) great!  what about problems with innerHTML?

Java developers using Tomcat would appreciate the death of URL sniffing.  It makes Tomcat web services a bitch when supporting legacy cross platform applications whose file extensions differ from Microsofts.

TheWitness

@Mike regarding bug tracking.  yes, there are a bunch of trolls out there that would try to flood with silly reports... but they wouldn't last long, because they would get turned down, and thus ignored.

For those of us with dozens of legitimate bug reports, it is painful to NOT have a place to track them, or submit them.

A simple system that gets you to narrow down your bug report to a specific component, then enter the "synopsis" of your bug is all that is needed.

With the above, (similar to say DIGG when submitting a story), it would present you with the top 10 bug reports that are strikingly close to what you submitted.  If one of them is the bug you submitted, you simply add yourself as a tracker/vote for it.  If it truly is a new bug, then you go ahead and submit it.

With community involvement (which many would be willing) you simply grant certain submitters "vip" status, and they in turn can verify bugs that are entered in the system, before MS even needs to blink an eye at a report.

Its a total win-win. Involving the community allows for self-policing if you will.  Everyone is happy because they can track bugs, and find workarounds, and MS is happy, because they only get a validated stream of verified bugs.  Its so simple, it drives us readers of this blog nuts, that it wasn't in place years ago.

jack.

@TheWitness: Do you have a specific example? URL extensions are generally only meaningful when the server doesn't send a correct MIME-type.  

@Someone: You can close inactive tabs in IE7.  Simply middle-click.

@G: Sounds like you've either got bad memory or another hardware issue (if you're blue-screening).

@Peter: Yes, compat is key.  If you code your WebOC-hosting applications following the APIs documented on MSDN, we will not break them with IE upgrades.  "Locking" to a specific version of the WebOC would introduce its own set of problems (for instance, you would need to ship the IE components with the version of your choice with your applications).  

finally, but in real world means nothing, ie 6 is still the most used browser, this is coming very late, i must used filters for at list  4-5 years more from now, maybe more.

if (url=='http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top') {

render(ACID2_IMAGE, 0, 0);

} else {

render(PAGE);

}

:P jk.

@someone:

#1: You can already close inactive (and active) tabs by right‐clicking them and selecting the Close command or by middle‐clicking them. This is pretty much the same interface used in all of the major browsers.

#3: Win. Internet Explorer 7 already appears to save the Window size and position. You can make it launch maximized in Windows XP by right‐clicking the icon used to launch it, selecting the Properties command, and changing the value in the Run drop‐down box to Maximized.

Yes but the middle click is not very convenient for mice that have a scroll wheel. Also, right clicking and selecting Close is a 2-step process. Why can't IE close tabs like Firefox can without making them active? This is not the solution to my issue.

@someone: maybe get a better mouse, because mine has a scroll wheel and yet makes middle clicking quite easy... :p

And personally, I find it much more convenient to middle click tabs to close them...

But yeah, with a bad mouse or on a laptop, it could still be nice to make things easier by mimicking the way Firefox does it... Or just not use IE. :)

Looking very forward to the public bug tracking for IE in 2008.

I have a friend who works for Microsoft and he has some inside info (which he probably shouldn't share, but its not like it is a huge secret!)

Apparently they have decided to ditch the IE Feedback site based on the "Feedback" system that is used for other MS Products.  He says they realized that it just wasn't the right tool for the job, and it was a pain to use and to transfer tickets into their internal system "Mantis, or Mantris"? or something like that?

anyway the new system should be up and ready in early 2008 and will allow us users and developers the ability to enter bugs into it as well as track issues (I think he said it had RSS capabilities)

It won't be much help for "Feature Requests" because, well, in his words.... "This late in the development, they'll just ignore feature requests.. MS goes for the 'Big Pie' features that users endlessly request, but the little things and UI fixes just don't get in"

It will handle attachments, so you'll be able to upload a test case or a workaround, and ***THIS TIME*** other users will be able to view and download them! (which is about frig'n time, as the last bug tracker they opened "IE Feedback" was a PITA with attachments only letting MS employees see them, which totally killed any attempt to share the workaround knowledge with others, or get a simplified test case.

Anyway, that's all the dirt he could give me without getting into trouble.

Definitely expect a first Quarter release for the bug tracker.. as they may likely time it to release with an IE8 beta.

Oh one last thing.  Apparently they have heard us screaming at them about shutting down the IE Feedback site... and this time, they won't shut it down when IE8 goes out the door.  They took a lot of heat on this in the developer community AND internally at Microsoft.

It sure takes a lot to get MS to get going on something, but when they make a mistake, they make darn sure that they don't make the same mistake twice! :-)

Congrats on Acid2! can't wait for IE8 Betas!

Jacob

I found this comment very wise.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx#6816333

Respecting the Holy Backward Compatibility is fully appropriate when an application supports the 1.0 version of the RFC #Whatever and you say that the new version supporting the 2.0 protocol is backward compatible because it *also* (or stills) support 1.0 protocol.

But with the IE issue, "Backward Compatible" here means "if possible, make that all the crappy workarounds made by web developers for IE previous versions are still apparently working with new versions, but in the same time, ensure that correct pages are showing nicely just as they should be".

Yeah, very simple. But is it so necessary?

IMHO, and I'm glad to see I'm not alone:

1. This should NOT be a application philosophy guideline, especially if it slows the normal developing process. A bug has to be fixed, that's the whole of it; and this should not be negociable. If some people rely for some reason on the buggy behaviour, it is their problem and their responsability. The problem is that many people rely on the buggy behaviour *and don't know they do*.

2. Most of web developers are not stupid enough to code only for IE. Their pages work well with a bunch of browsers. I think it would not be SO DIFFICULT to migrate their code to a "IE standards compliant" browser. Basically, they will start from their Mozilla version. :-) Guess what, they may even be HAPPY to do it.

3. Most of the time, you just can't guess what is "well formated" or "not well formated" because it relies on the display you expect, that of course, no browser can represent. Think about the smily guy again. Which computer can decide that a rendering is correct?

How can you make the difference between a "standard" "margin-myknees" usage and a "quirks" one, if the goal is to align elements properly on the page?

But it is not completely stupid to rely on the fact that the web developer has the correct version somewhere for a browser or another. So will it be so much work to make a IE8 version? Or in fact people won't be GLAD to REMOVE their workarounds? It's a real question.

As a web developer I was once, I never used these workarounds stylesheets or separate versions of javascript code. If some CSS element or whatever was not supported in IE or another browser, I just did not use it. Yes it was frustrating some times, and indeed my pages were not so sophisticated, a little bit less "cool" because 10-20% of the new released standards are not supported correctly by some browser or not supported at all. Fair enough, I lived with it. My websites were pretty enough, worked nice, and I dit not loose my time with compatibility issues.

This said, I admit some people have other needs or other churchs.

Anyway this is great news!

@someone: I’ve had no problems middle‐clicking with a scroll wheel. It feels natural to me anyway. My first mouse with a wheel had a wheel that was cumbersome to use though so it could be your mouse.

I have wonder how many tabs you keep open in Mozilla Firefox, by the way. I believe that the close buttons disappear on the inactive tabs when they get small enough.

“Why can't IE close tabs like Firefox can without making them active? This is not the solution to my issue.”

If my answer was not a solution, then you’re making the wrong request. I suspect that it should be something more like, “Internet Explorer should offer a tab closing mechanism for inactive tabs that requires no more than a non‐middle, single click (but should indeed require a click).” or, to be more specific, “Internet Explorer should offer a close button on each tab even if it’s active (and mimic Mozilla Firefox’s disappearing close button behavior when the tab is small in width?)”. (Presumably, you also find the, IMO, cumbersome keyboard method (press Tab until the active tab is focused, press the arrow keys until the relevant inactive tab is focused, press Enter to make it active, and press Ctrl+W) and the double‐click method (where you anticipate the location of the close button on the inactive tab) unacceptable too.)

I want to be able to close the first tab!!!

It is frustrating that I have to open a new tab, to close the first tab in IE7.

If I want to close down my Gmail, MSN, or whatever page, I shouldn't have to open a new tab to do it.

I understand what MS was thinking they were doing.. "well, if you want to close down the last tab, just navigate somewhere else" is all very good, but users don't think like that, they want to do what they do everywhere else (including in other browsers)... middle-click... gone!

Its a minor detail, but one of the many minor details that keeps me from using IE7 on a daily basis.

As of late one Office Space quote always seems to come to mind when I visit here.

"Yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday? ... We're a little behind ... trying to play catch up."

Yeah, I know it's a little chopped up to make it fit here, but still, with the little chopping it fits in so well.

Anyways, that's not the real reason for my post. Firstly, happy new year to all ya on the IE team, and secondly, the new year's already here, time to head back to work and actually start posting here with updates. We all want to see updates posted here on what's happening, and there's no good reason not to keep us informed, so we darn well expect to see more here on the development of IE8.

Also I would just like to echo some of the other wants. CSS, SVG, actual JavaScript/ECMAScript (I am so sick of Jscript and hearing about it, not to mention not much can tick me off the way the resources pages talk about Jscript; this is something I have never said about anyone or anything before but Jscript sucks and deserves to die painfully, implement the real and documented standard and do it right), and proper handling of XHTML. I know IE7 did a better job with XHTML, but I remember seeing a few sites that held examples of problems still in IE7. Should anyone care to see them I'll try looking them up again and post them here if/when I find them again.

Congrats on (finally) outputting correct CSS2! I know ACID2 doesn't cover all of CSS2, but what it covers is very useful.

What I don't like about the announcement (and which has been confirmed by Chris Wilson and others on your team on the W3C mailing lists) is that this standard mode won't be 'standard' - as in, it'll require an opt-in flag.

I create web pages; I favour XHTML 1.0 Strict, and I send correct MIME type to those browsers that support it. How do I detect it?

The way it's supposed to be done. As in, I look at 'HTTP_ACCEPT', and I check if application/xhtml+xml is supported. When it is, I add the XML prologue to the page, remove meta http-equiv, and send the correct MIME type. If not, no XML prologue and http-equiv added.

Now, since IE supports '*/*' it is supposed to accept application/xhtml+xml. That's what the specs says, that's what it's supposed to be about. It isn't.

Ever since IE 3, IE supports '*/*' (as in, IE can open anything).

Do you want to know an opt-in mechanism you could use? USE CORRECT HTTP_ACCEPT! Remove dumbass '*/*' support (or keep it, with q=0.1)! If a document is sent with anything other than 'text/html' (or text/text, since IE will render even plain text as HTML as soon as it contains something that looks like an SGML tag)

Specify what file types IE 8 will actually support! Update your MIME-type support table! You know, like application/javascript, since text/javascript has been deprecated for ten years now.

Interestingly, getting standards-compliant with no opt-in switch would be quite easy if you actually implemented basics - like HTTP/1.1 basics.

Two things that are really important:

1. HTML 5's doctype and any real (as in application/xhtml+xml) XHTML must trigger full standard compilant mode;

2. When many people are using this great new mode, remove the old engines part by part to make a smooth transition to standard compilant WWW ^_^

This is one thing that gets to me that Mitch 74 reminded me of. The whole thing where IE will render whatever it feels like as HTML even when explicitly told it's text, this breaks so many sites, and the fact that IE will render something saved as .txt then render as .html breaks even more. For a group intent on "not breaking the net" you're sure doing an obscene amount of damage to it.

Heck, it's a security flaw at some levels since unscrupulous people can just find some easy IE flaw and then exploit it and save the site as .txt, enough users of other browsers see this enough that they'd take a moment to think about if the site is worth seeing, then fire up IE and get owned by something that never could've affected them if IE just handled text right. I'll even bet that the trade off of people who wind up needing IE to view .txt sites who wouldn't normally use IE is probably about equal to the people who like IE and have to use other browsers just to see the embedded text in xyz site. And don't any of you dare to claim standards compliance till this is fixed, since actually handling mime types and doing what the developer tells IE to do is kind of important to being compliant.

Yeah, you got ACID2 down, congrats. Unfortunately it's pretty small when compared with the whole list of things to fix in IE, and  all the silence isn't helping. Daily updates would be appreciated, just have some team member take 5-10 mins at the end of the day to blog about what they got done and a lot of us will be a bit happier. You said there'd be more info about IE8 so lets see it all, cause one post really doesn't count.

@Office Space: Yeah, and I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday too... I'll send you another copy of the memo...

ARHRAHHGAHGAHRHG!!!!

Anytime MS mentions JScript a shiver of VB4.0 variety coding horror shivers down my spine.

Using the term JScript instead of JavaScript is like trying to specifically fly in defiance of standards, by not even using the correct name.

No one cares if it is called JScript at MS, the rest of the planet calls it JavaScript.

@Jacob T - wow! nice to finally hear about the new bug tracking!  I'll be so glad when there is one central repository for this stuff.  It is so annoying to have to scavenge the web/google every time I want to find a solution to an IE bug, or even verify if I've hit one or not.

@sroussey - bang on! I'm with you there

@cwilso - re: "IE8 Standards mode" - can you clarify the punctuation in this statement... do you mean that Acid2 works in IE8 (comma) in standards mode?  or that it works in some (TBD) IE8 specific standards mode?

ralph

Ou comment palier à l'une des plus vicieuses déficiences mentales du navigateur le plus pourri de la planète sans renoncer à un élément HTML très pratique. [MÀJ] : il semblerait que le comprtement de MSIE soit encore plus pernicieux que ça.

I came to the blog looking to vent some IE spleen.  But this is good news.  All we need to know now is when is IE8 going to be released?

The sooner I don't have to support IE6 the better.

there's nothing new below, but I would like to see:

- updates with the same regularity as FF

- opening up plug in development like FF (those open src tools are the  best developers tools available) - or at least pay someone to build them properly and keep improving them - IE toolbar is not there yet!

- a review of your configuration dialogues - they are a nightmare

Sadly for MS (or perhaps luckily, if you're that way inclined) - just copy your competitors!

nice but

problems innerHTML?

IE8 passed the Acid2 test!! What's next then...

"I also expect backwards compatibility." That's a rather nice sentence. I'm not sure whether vista   follow this?  

Well done. Hope that IE8 will have automatic updates, so you can make sure people are using the latest browser.

Really cool!

I hope this means IE8 is going to be the developers choice of browser.  Sadly so far my although I mostly use IE for my personal web browsing, I've chosen Firefox for client side web development.  

I think it would be great to see the IE team introduce the ability to create plugins for IE similiar to Firefox. It would be sweet to have the debugging features like Firefox's DomInspector.  I would also love it if there was an option in IE for Jscript errors to appear in the status bar (similar to firefox), displaying them in a popup dialogue box in some circumstances can be quite cumbersome.

i browse onfy with the firefox!

Will it have support for CSS3 ?

Any chance of getting a screenshot of the current build's status of the Acid3 test?  That would be really interesting as a metric, as neither FF3b2 or Opera 9.5 pass it yet.

Acid3 is not yet done, but it'd still be interesting.

http://hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/003/

Last night, Ron presented to the Memphis .NET Users Group .&#160; The talk began with the improved administrative

C&#39;est la nouvelle du jour: la version (interne) de d�veloppement principale d&#39;Internet Explorer 8 passe le test Acid2. Dean Hachamovitch de Microsoft <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer...

I just ran across something from December that is of major significance to web developers WW. The Internet

In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to

In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to

In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to

A couple of months a IE rendering dilemma: How to fix IE8's rendering engine without breaking all the corporate intranets out there? How to create both a standards oriented browser and still ensure that the main customers of Microsoft - the enterprises

&quot;Porque se visualiza diferente en IE7, que en IE6? Como ser&#225; el IE8?&quot;... son variadas

OK, so the title is mine, but you can see here how the defacto standard that was IE4/5/6 meant that people

Back in 2006 support for many of the more advanced selectors were still very limited. Most browsers did not support the new selectors introduced by CSS level 3 at all and even support for the selectors...

As Dean announced , a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the first half of 2008.

As Dean announced , a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the first half of 2008

Acid2 をうけて 2008 内のマイルストーン展開を見込んでいる IE 8。 個人的にも 2008 年の最大関心事と位置づけて期待していますがプロダクトマネ...

There is speculation among some of the technology watch groups that the first beta for IE 8 may be released

There is speculation among some of the technology watch groups that the first beta for IE 8 may be released

Com'era stato promesso lo scorso dicembre, entro la fine di questo trimestre Microsoft prevede di rilasciare al pubblico la prima versione beta di Internet Explorer 8. A confermare questa tabella di marcia &egrave; una email, inviata da Microsoft ad u

Just to let you guys know… Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the IE team, just announced that IE8

Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test , some of you may be seeing results like the image

Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test , some of you may be seeing results like the image

This is what Phil Nachreiner, Internet Explorer Developer has posted on the Official IE blog: Although

C'est la petite surprise du jour, Microsoft vient en effet d'annoncer aujourd'hui qu'Internet Explorer 8 adoptera le mode de rendu standard par défaut. En effet, on savait déjà que la prochaine version du navigateur de Redmond possèderait 2 moteurs

Sasvim slučajno (a možda i ne) uskoro će nam se uporedo pojaviti dve nove verzije dva najpopularinija

De forma algo inesperada Microsoft ha puesto a disposición (¡desde ya!) una beta1 de su navegador Internet Explorer en su octava versión, el “browser” que debería competir con Firefox versión 3 para el reinado de la navegación por la WWW.Como es

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Join us today as we discuss The Vaccine Book b y Robert W. Sears. This is the second time that contributors of Silicon Valley Moms Blog , Chicago Moms Blog, DC Metro Moms Blog and NYC Moms Blog (along with the rest our friends throughout the blogsphere)

This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The topic is complicated

If you did not know Microsoft is currently working on Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), you may ask why a new

&gt; In the same way Open Office is forcing Microsoft Office to be a better prod...

Mozilla, Firefox 3 ile bomba gibi geliyorum diye dursun...

Internet Explorer 8, Acid2 testini bile geçiyorum desin... Windows ortamında bir rakip, sessizce kalpleri feth etmeye başlıyor. Kim mi? Safari! Çoğu kişinin tepkisini tahmin edebiliyorum. Taht

I focused on the things I enjoyed and looked for business opportunities that had a fit with my interests. It was at this stage I came across Network Marketing or MLM. My initial reaction was that of probably everyone’ s (another scam to take my hard earned),