Internet Explorer 8 Passes The Acid 2 Test
Internet Explorer has been the bane of web development for the past 4 or 5 years. When Internet Explorer 6 first came out, it was awesome! I loved it. But then when CSS and standards-based design became popular I realized how bug-ridden the browser actually was. Then Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to stop production on Internet Explorer and IE became a stale, dated, and to put bluntly, horrible web browser. The problem was that everyone used it!
Internet Explorer 7
Finally, Microsoft released IE 7 last year. It made some huge improvements over IE6 and had some much improved CSS support, however, it still lacked a lot of features from CSS and was not quite as capable as standards-based web developers wanted.
The Acid 2 Test
The Acid 2 Test is a test created by the web standards project for browser manufacturers to test CSS and standards-support in their browser. In late 2005 Safari announced that Safari 2.02 passed the Acid test, and Konqueror and iCab have also announced that they passed the test.
Firefox has yet to pass the test (Firefox 3 BETA 2 supposedly passes it), but Firefox doesn’t have nearly the issues that IE has had in supporting standards. So for IE to finally pass the Acid Test is a huge accomplishment. Currently, my development process consists of coding for Firefox/Safari and once it all works, then I create my separate IE6 and IE7 stylesheets to get my work to display properly in those browsers. From the sound of this latest announcement, I won’t have to worry about IE8.
Here’s what a bunch of other bloggers are saying about the announcement.
I’m still not quite jumping for joy, however, it will be some time before we can forget about supporting IE6. It’s been a while since IE7 came out, and I’m still finding half of the Internet Explorer users on my sites are using IE6. So even if IE8 is brought out next year, it will be some time before we can rely on users installing IE8.
Opera Lawsuit Against Microsoft
I thought it was kind of ironic that in a few weeks after Opera filed their lawsuit against Microsoft in the European Union that it was announced that IE8 had passed the Acid 2 Test. The lawsuit claimed that Microsoft was forcing users to use Internet Explorer as opposed to any other browser, and that it had poor support for standards. Now their whole case is kind of out the window.
