Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Comments

look over here! Standards!

[bigbadbuccidaddy]

microsoft made this decision in a desperate attempt to hide the fact that ie8 can't properly render any content, standards-compliant or not. They are just trying to push the work off on web developers. Ie8 won't be any more standards compliant than ie7, it probably still won't support XHTML, svg, or even completely support PNG.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bigstrat2003]

...and it is better that they do this... No it isn't. This is going to make half the Web break in IE8. The smart thing to do was what they did originally: default to legacy IE mode, and allow site developers to put a meta tag in to force standards mode. Then, some number of years down the road, when the majority of people were running sites that were standards-compliant (with or without the special meta tag), IE could've defaulted to standards mode. It's called phasing out old stuff, which is something you have to do when the old behavior is so widespread.

Microsoft caved in to the complaints of people who don't give a damn about breaking functionality for the majority of users, and they're a bunch of retards for doing so.