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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."
How inconvenient is it to switch into and out of standards mode? Do you have to navigate menus or is there a button on the statusbar? Will it automatically switch between the two, based on whether or not the site demands IE7 or not? Is standards mode on by default?
That's not necessarily true. There are graceful ways to deprecate commonly used design elements, even those specific to IE (read: hacks). It's been my experience that once someone says, "ok, this still works but it's going away" developers shun it like the plague for anything in active development, and rightly so.
Is anyone else having trouble with the acid2 page? Safari and Firefox 3.0 beta 1 are failing to render it in the same way.
It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an <img> tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago. Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. (Yeah, it's been a while, and maybe they've fixed that, but c'mon.... it was 2006!) Too bad they lined up the Mac guys against a wall and shot them, ensuring that it would take almost a decade to get that one feature into IE/Win.
Feel free to correct me if I've made any factual errors in this post.* Flame if you want, but nicely worded, verifiable responses are preferred and worth a lot more to readers in general.
* aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the fixes? With the standard breaking IE6, random "updates" that makes IE7 css hacks useless, and now a new "standard compliant" IE8 that may or may not contain other bugs The task of writing pages to support IE6, IE7, IE8 will become equivalent to travelling on a mine field, a melting glacier and an active volcano in 3 parallel universes in the same car at the same time
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It explains why they've switched to the Word rendering engine for Outlook. The fewer places they're standards compliant, the better for their lockin.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It looks like a server problem, since all previously-passing engines are displaying the same error. More detail in this comment.
I agree that tabs suck, but unfortunately, they are the best we have right now
If an easy shortcut to open in a new window existed, and window organization (easily!) into hierarchies was allowed in the general case, such that switching inside any level of the hierarchy was possible, and was convenient (the Window scale effect comes to mind), then tabs would become an unnecessary ad-hoc kludge.
Think about it why should we use tabs, really?
Easy. The vast majority of window managers on any OS, when a new window is opened, will give it focus. Most of the time that's probably the wrong thing to do (in my opinion) but that is the default behaviour. I like to browse through pages on Ebay, Wikipedia, Slashdot etc., and when I see a link I like I middle-click on it. In Firefox and IE7 this opens a new tab without switching focus and loads the page in the background. On IE6 it opens a new window (in fact you have to right-click then select open in new window), I then have to ALT-TAB or click back to my original window to carry on browsing. Most people that I've pointed this out to have then tried browsing with tabs for a few days and never gone back. On IE6 if you're browsing with the window maximised then open a link in a new window, the new window will not be maximised, so again I have to mess around to carry on browsing the way I want.
I'm usually totally against MDI type arrangements, of which tabs I guess are really a derivative. However, I have to say that I find tabbed browsing extremely efficient and intuitive.