IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test 555
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."
Standards Mode? (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
Re:any standard will do (Score:3, Interesting)
Acid2 Website Problems? (Score:2, Interesting)
Remember kids... (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [wikipedia.org] Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. [slashdot.org] (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.
Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So let's geek this out (Score:5, Interesting)
It explains why they've switched [microsoft.com] to the Word rendering engine for Outlook. The fewer places they're standards compliant, the better for their lockin.
Re:So let's geek this out (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Remember kids... (Score:3, Interesting)
No but the browsers that do pass are in a higher category all to themselves.
Re:Tabs are evil (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Tabs are evil (Score:5, Interesting)
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.