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IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."
Would anyone mind if they had rewrite their web pages or at the very least, remove the code that checks for the version of IE and if it is IE in the first place? I wouldn't mind.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I guess when Bill Gates asks what the hell is going on, he gets results!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How well is Opera's lawsuit with M$ going to go over with this news?
Good News: ...
... in the year 2012 (give or take a few years), when the percentage of web users using IE 5, 6 or 7 finally dips below 5%.
Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser
Bad News:
After all, how hard is it to build a special case for one specific website?
No rush Microsoft, Firefox and Opera work just fine for me and everyone that I know.
Wow, talk about moving the goalposts. It's reasonable to expect a Web browser to adhere to standards -- so when IE finally does, the new reason to hate MS is because IE also supports the pages that are on the Web today?
Making IE8 render pages the way IE7 does is the smart way to go for Microsoft. If people woke up one morning and none of their sites looked right, they'd be rightfully pissed off. IE8 will give people the time to make their "crap code" standards-compliant ... though if they haven't done it by IE9, they might be shit out of luck.
Oh, and BTW -- as long as people are coding, there will always be crap code. Standards will not make crap code go away.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
What's really holding the web back is the quirks mode which still exists in IE7, and will exist in IE8. If Microsoft is serious about standards support, they need to stop supporting 'web designers' who right non-compliant code.
With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web.
Soooo... since you have created a community of non-standard web development practices in an otherwise open and standards-based world-wide community, you still feel like you should defend those who followed you in your path of non-standard lock-inery. No thanks. Suck it up and admit you made a big mistake by painting yourself into a corner.
This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded.
Actually, that sounds exactly like your first goal. "As they were coded" really means "As they were coded to work with our non-standards-based web browser". Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.
Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE.
I'd like to hear about the 'pre-dated standards' you speak of. Most likely, You're talking about practices you implemented in IE that wandered from existing standards, which maybe became stabilized post-M$ implementation. You can't defend non-standardization by blaming the standards for being STANDARDS. If you break standards that everyone is supposed to adhere to, its YOUR fault, NOT those who didn't embrace your specific practices as their own, personal standards.
We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle."
How about just making IE8 as standards-based as the other players in the field instead of feeling like you are required to ween your followers from your own sour milk?
As far as I'm concerned, the underlying goal is (and always has been for M$) in the very $ at the end of M$ that has become so popular for many. You can't mask the underlying motive with excuses like what you have given.
Suck it up and play by the rules, or you'll eventually be kicked out of the game.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.
Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.
The point? The point is I can write proper CSS now, without having to worry about how IE will fuck it up. I can use alpha channels in png's and all sorts of things without writing it two different ways, so it will render across all browsers. I don't care about how crappily written the rest of the web is, I can write my little bits of it properly. Standards compliance isn't about punishing content authors that don't adhere to the standard. It perfectly alright to be lenient about non-validating code. But validating code needs to be rendered properly, and Microsoft seems to be getting that point at last.
I find it something of a curious coincidence that as soon as Opera starts asking the EU to take legal action against MS and the little web developer revolt a while ago about the distinct lack of any information coming from the IE team regarding 8 that all of a sudden we have this "we'll be passing the acid2 test".
I can't help be slightly suspicious. I'll believe it when I see it.
Sorry if that's not inflammatory enough. I could try harder. I must say, though, this is good news and I'm glad the IE 8 team is working on this. Better late than never. Oh, and I can't get Firefox 2 or the beta of 3 to pass Acid2 either.
While we're on the subject of Firefox, whose bright idea was it to solve the memory leaks in 2.0.0.8 or so by making 2.0.0.11 use more and more processor time instead of more memory? Seriously, it's easy enough to kill a 200 MB Firefox instance and reopen the browser, but this 97% processor usage is just a pain in the ass. Infinite loops are not progress. I don't have to worry about that particular problem in any version of IE I've ever seen from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive.
The real question is, how back-portable is the IE8 browser? If it only runs on Vista, it's not going to matter much.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Because, you know, you can write a browser which can pass Acid2 in a few days (especially given how bad it was to start with).
That depends on when IE8 is released. It took them 1.75 years to get from announcing IE7 (Feb 2005) to releasing it (Nov 2006). Presumably they've been working on IE8 for a while, but if it takes them another 21 months, we're looking at fall 2009. Who knows what the Windows install base will look like then?
Personally, I'm hoping it'll be out by the end of 2008, though my current goal is to get people the hell off of IE6. Upgrade to IE7, switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever, just ditch that aging monstrosity of a browser if you possibly can (and aren't barred by your IT department, or a need to access some critical site that only works in IE6).
They passed the AcidTest before Opera filed the brief with the EU so...come up with conspiracies elsewhere.
To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.
Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
According to the video, they've been working on this since August -- well before the Opera suit.
But like they mention on the IE8 blog, the Acid 2 test doesn't test for adherence to any standards per say. Having a browser that passes the Acid2 test means that you're browser should render most things correctly, provided you haven't added specific hacks just to pass the test. I've found that Safari actually has more rendering bugs than Firefox, even though Safari passes Acid2 and Firefox does not. You could probably pretty quickly write a program that rendered Acid2 correctly. It wouldn't know how to render any other page, but it would pass the Acid2 test. As a web developer, and based on real world experience, I find that Firefox has the fewest rendering problems. Or maybe it just seems that way because the web developer extension makes them so easy to resolve.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's because you're a complete clown. Really? Wouldn't be too surprised? Blind Microsoft hate at its finest, everything else be damned.
Sounds like the old Microsoft Cairo project. Each time a competitor was about to release a new product or new version of a product, Microsoft would launch a press release stating how much better everything would be with Cairo, who would be just six months away. The press and potential customers turned away from the competitor and started to talk about the marvelous Cairo future instead.
Except that Cairo never materialized.
Nah, check out the low UID.
More likely the voice of bitter experience.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Firefox has Standards Mode, too (right-click anywhere on a page->View Page Info). It differentiates between "Quirks" mode and Standards-compliance mode. "Quirks" mode is used when invalid markup is detected, or if there's no DOM declared; Standards-compliance mode simply means that the site is being displayed to spec, instead of being cleaned up by the browser's interpretation as to what way it should look. Standards-compliance mode, in theory, should always look the same on every browser (it's why standards *exist*), but as everyone who's done web design knows, that's not the case. That's not to say I support Microsoft, but as a web developer, I have to look forward to the day when most of the audience on the web can view my pages properly, without the need for time-consuming workarounds. In actuality, IE7 really has impacted me to an extent, since none of the old workarounds for IE6 work for it any more, and it still doesn't get things right. So I have to work around IE6, IE7, and any differences that those workarounds cause in browsers like Opera and Firefox who display it right the first time, which is a major headache and waste of time considering there's standards for these browsers to follow.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Yeah, sure, they probably just dug in and whipped up a fully standards-compliant web browser over the weekend. Give me a break.
When did Acid2 become a standard?
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
More importantly, when does a low UID on slashdot indicate that you are somehow more experienced than other IT professionals? Not registering for a glorified blog, until recently, has absolutely no bearing on someone's experience or lack thereof.
When it's a joke.
As much as I was bemused by considering a UID > 100,000 as low, I still understood that the post wasn't serious.
Advanced users are users too!
Netscape started it!
In short, it's more efficient for what I do. For those that only open 1 or 2 pages at a time and leave one page when they visit a new page, maybe it's not worth their while. I have 8 sessions of firefox open right now with an average 5-6 tabs open in each. One's got 10 tabs open to comic strips I like to read in the morning. Another has 5 slashdot tabs open. Another has e-bay and a college text book selection open with multiple shopping sites in tabs, etc. My task bar couldn't hold 40 or so firefox windows on it along with all of the other programs I have running and be as efficient at finding what I want when I wanted to switch tasks.
As another user stated, it saves on memory resources to use tabs as well. You don't have to use them -- you can even turn tabs off completely in many browsers. I think they're the best invention for the web since the search engine, but maybe they're not for you. Tabs are just a tool. I find them incredibly useful for what I do, but maybe some people like yourself don't have a use for them.
Conversely, being in a position and interest to have registered for Slashdot back in the day indicates that at least you have seen some water pass under the bridge. I was told about Slashdot while chatting to Eric Raymond, back when The Cathedral and the Bazaar was new and controversial, and Miquel woss-name, back when Gnome vs KDE was a battle people cared about. Views acquired by umpteen years of industry watching might not be right, but they are at least a perspective. ian
If something is implemented by only one application, it is not a standard.
And MS is a member of the W3C, if I'm not severely mistaken.
There is no such thing as "IE standard". If there were, then different versions of IE wouldn't render pages completely differently.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Agreed, I sometimes have more tabs open than the amount of icons I could manage on the task bar.
I'm often switching between tabs with CTRL+Tab or CTRL+Shit+Tab (with Firefox) improving my navigation between web pages.