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Story: Microsoft faces a web-standards Acid test

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Won't hold my breath

As a web developer it has been incredibly frustrating having to support Microsofts buggy browsers. IE7 was a good step in the right direction. I'd never use it as my browser of choice but supporting it has been a lot easier than supporting IE6. I can't wait to see the back of that browser.

The Acid2 test is not a game or an extra bullet point they can slap on IE8 by cheating. I understand why Microsoft may want to avoid being truly standards compliant - because they want all the badly coded websites that only work in IE to continue to be supported. Not because they care about the developer of these shoddy sites or the users but because as long as there are sites that won't work well in non-IE browsers it will encourage the use of IE. By making the default settings render pages correctly then those pages will break in IE too and it will either force the site developers to learn how to do their job properly and create standards compliant pages (losing IE it's exclusive access to those sites) or users will stick to older versions of IE so they can view these sites making IE8 uptake low.

Microsoft is in a difficult position as they will be criticised by ignorant users and cowboy developers if they make standards compliant browser that shows up errors in pages that seemed to work before. If they cling on to the bit of both approach they will disappoint and frustrate real developers who have to support the non-compliant browser. They will also be in a situation they will be just another compliant browser competing against the speed of Safari and the features of Opera and Firefox.

With Outlook 2007 switching it's rendering engine from IE to Word backfiring and causing Microsoft themselves to not be able to create HTML emails for their own product (see xbox live html emails on my blog) maybe they will learn their lesson and look and moving forward.

I think that if MS do the right thing and go compliant and offer great features in their browser instead of holding on to old proprietary code support they will gain more respect from developers rather than be a thorn in their side. This will probably require them to open up the browser to user created extensions/add-ons to compete with the likes of Firefox as any feature Microsoft create someone will make an add-on for Firefox that can do it.

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