IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default

A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.

Comments

Correct link

[RockMFR]

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox?

Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:

• Javascript - Safari, Opera, and Konquerer all have at least some support for Javascript DOM 3, which Firefox lacks in the released versions so far.
• image formats - Konquerer supports MNG, Tiff, and PDF. Safari supports JPEG 2000, Tiff, and PDF. I know of no standard image formats Firefox supports not supported by both of those (yet).
• XHTML 1.1 lists Firefox at 63% and question marks for Safari and Konquerer, but wikipedia currently lists both of those as having "full support" and Firefox as "partial."
• Web Forms 2.0 - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
• Voice XML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
• WML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't

That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.

In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).

Improved standards isn't the story here

[trepan]

The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."

If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan, all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.