IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise?

An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting: "In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."

Comments

Why should this surprise anyone?

[aristotle-dude]

It is MSFT's interest to promote their own quasi standards to encourage Windows platform lock-in.

Re:Why should this surprise anyone?

[mrbah]

The problem (for MICROS~1) is that web developers got wise to this, and have gotten pretty good at hacking around IE's awful errors while still maintaining standards compliance. So MICROS~1 has turned around and actively started changing the nature of the errors in each version, just to make life harder for developers. They haven't truly improved standards support since IE 5.5, they've just changed the rendering errors in an attempt to stop developers from creating standards complaint pages. If that's not anti-competitive, I don't know what is.

Re:There's a saying..

[nametaken]

Yeah, no kidding.

To all the douchebags over at MSFT... thanks for the aggravation and millions of posts we're all going to have to make over the next few years. You've sealed our fate.

We hate you... again... and can't wait for the day when you're all out of a job.