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."
Unforunately, it's not that simple. Previous versions of IE were broken enough that standards-compliant HTML and CSS would not render properly. So if you wanted the majority of people to be able to actually use your site, you /had/ to be aware of - and often code around - IE stupidity, for all but the simplest of applications.