Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Article
12/19/2007

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Acid2 Face

If you’re not a web developer, the details of this blog post probably aren’t all that interesting for you. I’d like you to know that we’re building IE8 for many different customers (consumers, web service providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, web developers, and others), and we’ll cover more details of the non-developer oriented work (e.g. user experience, reliability, security, etc.) in other posts in the future, after MIX.

While web developers will immediately recognize what Acid2 means, I want to step back and offer some context for other readers of this blog who may not be familiar with web standards. Briefly: Acid2 is one test of how modern browsers work with some specific features across several different web standards.

At first glance, this test seems simple. I think it actually offers a view into the subtle and complex world of web standards in a number of ways. Showing the Acid2 page correctly is a good indication of being standards compliant, but Acid2 itself isn’t a web standard or a web standards compliance test. The publisher of the test, the Web Standards Project, is an advocacy group, not a web standards defining body.

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

The key goal (for the Web Standards Project as well as many other groups and individuals) is interoperability. As a developer, I’d prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers. Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work.

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.

Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video.

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better. We will have a lot more information available at sessions at MIX08 and will release a beta of IE8 in the first half of calendar 2008.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

p.s. The following is the actual code check-in mail from Friday that pushed the code changes from developers’ machines into the central IE build. I’ve removed references to email aliases and UNC paths. “DRTs” are tests that developers check-in along with their code, in case you’re wondering about the .htm .xml and .js below.

From: IE Builder
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 11:19 PM
To: IE Check-in Mail; IESnap System Notifications
Cc: alias1
Subject: [LONGHORN_IE8; Alias 1]: FW: Green RI #5

Checkin 3457 processed by SNAP:

Developer:	[alias1]
Branch:	LONGHORN_IE8
Change Number:	inetcore: 149329
Code Review:	[alias2]
Buddy Test:	[alias3]; [alias4]
Logs Directory:	<unc path to log>
Description:	[alias1] Change Description: Reverse integration from green branch. Includes full implementation of ACID2 Appcompat Impact: none Risk: 1 Affects API documentation: No Resource Change: No Code reviewer(s): [alias2] Buddy tester(s): [alias3]; [alias4]

Files for changelist 149329 in inetcore depot:

Integrated Files

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//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSBREAKRECORDAPI.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSBREAKRECORDSUBLAPI.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSCONTXT.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSCRLINE.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSCRSUBL.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSDNFIN.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsDsply.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSFETCH.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsMath.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSOBJRUBY.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSOBJWARICHU.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsQCore.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsQLine.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsQSubl.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LsQuerySpanInfoCore.cpp
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSSPANSERVICE.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSTFSET.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSTXTBR1.CPP
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSCBKGEN.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSCBKTXT.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSGEOM.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSPELCBK.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSTRELBREAKREC.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSTRELCBK.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSTRELCBKDS.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSADAPTERTOTRACK.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSMULTICOLUMNLAYOUTDS.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/fsoptimalparalayoutmanager.h
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSOPTIMALPARAMAIN.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSPAGEFMTSTATECORE.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSPAGEFMTSTATESERVICE.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/fsparaoptimizer.h
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSPELCORE.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSSPANLAYOUTDS.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSSUBPAGEAPI.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FsTableSrvCellsComn.H
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/fstextattobj.h
//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inci/FSTEXTCONTEXT.H

Comments

Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Today Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch posted about an important milestone in the
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
IE Team Announces IE8 Milestones (Acid2 Tests Passed!)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode .
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Welcome back to the dialogue! This is great news.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@About Time, thanks for the feedback. See, we are listening. :) Seriously, though, the point is that we have been out there listening to web developers and designers and what they need, at conferences and forums as well as reading the comments on our blog.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Thats great. I just made the test with Firefox and it failed.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is awesome news, guys. Beautiful job. I love the new "we'll disclose stuff when we have working code and know we can deliver" policy, by the way.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Let's keep it simple: congratulations!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
It's great to finally see some actual news about the next version of Internet Explorer. Hopefully, this is just the start of IE's trend towards open standards compliance. As stated in the post, this is just a single test case, but it is surely a sign of progress and probably a significant internal milestone. I look forward to seeing continued progress but still do not understand the unwillingness to talk more openly about anticipated features. I feel the development community would appreciate more transparency here even if the IE team is unable to deliver 100% on their goals. It would be more reassuring to hear about the teams expectations for the next release than to hear about improvements only once such milestones have been reached. I look forward to your next IE8 post and what other surprises you may have in store (as seeing that yellow smiley face at the top of your post was most certainly unexpected).
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Ya,just keep it up.... SVG and more... maybe even a .NET 3.5 GUI
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Excellent. The hate I've felt all these years is dimming from a bright burning sun to the dull tickle of an annoyance.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
A totally kewl announcement that I am sure coders everywhere will welcome! Way to go guys on such a huge step in adopting Web Standards. Ping back: http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/12/microsoft-internet-explorer-8-passes.html Philip Elder MPECS Inc.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Oh, and IE NEEDs Pipelining with up to 8+ network connections at one time.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Will IE8 pass ACID2 test if we change the default Font from Times New Roman to Cambria? I tried changing the default font to Cambria on Firefox 3 Beta and Opera browsers. Firefox 3 renders it a bit off and incorrect. Opera seems to be rendering it properly.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Now, add the usability functions that would make me switch from FF:

Inline spell check. Please please please
Live bookmarks toolbars. This is the best way to view your favorite few RSS feeds.
the inline search bar from F is very good. The ctrl-F function from IE is out-dated.
The interagted search bar in FF has many advatages of the one in IE.
When typing an address, the autofill only shows the URL. That's sometimes useles.. It would be nice to see the Page Title, URL, and favicon.

Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Now THIS is good news, and it's very nice of you to tell us Dean. Even though I do sincerely think it would've been better for everyone (for you from a PR standpoint and for us developers from a "what does tomorrow hold for me" point of view) if you'd done what the Webkit team did a few months/years back when they were pushing for ACID2 themselves: regularly blog on the progress, showing the smiley face and everything, tell us what was updated, maybe why you'd focused on that particular feature that time (if there was a specific reason), etc... And since you're speaking of milestones for standard supports and interoperability, would it be possible for us to get a glimpse of these milestones? Maybe a tentative roadmap with both a few internal goals and some external onces (planned releases of public alphas/betas maybe, stuff like that) Anyway thanks a lot for the update, it's nice knowing you're this far.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode .
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome, so you'll finally be standards complient when IE8 launches in 2012? Great news.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Simply said: congratulations! :)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
These are the web's most talked about URLs on Wed 19th Dec 2007. The current winner is ..
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
So, we now know we have (in IE8 standards mode at least (BTW, what switch are you using for that, or is that still undecided?)):

data URI scheme
display: table
position: fixed Guess the old layout engine really was what was holding you back a lot, but there again, I could've guessed that years ago :P

Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Hi, Dean- Great to see the progress you're making, not only in your implementation, but in communicating what's going on inside the IE development team. Keeping the community informed is really critical. Minor correction: the "X" in AJAX is "XML", not "XmlHttpRequest". XML has been a standard for a good long while. But it's true that XHR is just now being standardized by W3C, and is indeed the typical method of choice for AJAX (though not the only one... Adobe introduced the similar "getURL" long ago in their SVG viewer). Thanks- -Schepers
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
That's awesome news! Congrats guys!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Microsoft is currently in the middle of the process of creating the next generation Microsoft web browser, with the fantastic name - Internet Explorer 8. A few days ago, the IE team reports, the inter...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@cwilso: re: "Seriously, though, the point is that we have been out there listening to web developers and designers and what they need, at conferences and forums as well as reading the comments on our blog" EXACTLY... NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. First off, I haven't been to any dev conventions in the last year or so, because I don't have $1,000 to waste on them (sure I'd love to meet and chat with certain celebs within the community, but I'm not paying $1,000 for the chance to potentially file a verbal bug. Second, this blog. Is a Blog, not the appropriate venue for filing bug reports. I can't verify they've been read by an IE Team Dev that would be responsible for the issue, nor can I get feedback as to when the bug was verified by MS (or others), I can't post a simple (or complex) test case, I can't post a workaround for those also suffering from the bug, I can't see when the fix is targeted for, and or for what version(s) of IE. I also can't track the bug, as it moves through to its final published fix. Most importantly, I don't have one, single, public repository where I can go search bugs (and workarounds) when I encounter an issue. Since the dawn of this millennium, software vendors making a web browser ABSOLUTELY NEED a public bug tracking system. It is vital to the health of the community, the open 2-way communication that MS promised 2.5 years ago, and the minimal effort required to be seen as at least extending an olive branch. By not having a public bug tracking site, you are instantly seen as an inferior product (whether you are or not). Its like a company these days without a website. But most of all, it shows poor taste. It shows you don't give a hoot about developers, about standards, about fixing the core exposed API's, and the future of the Web. Be serious please. Even IE Team members posting on this very blog publicly admitted that Public Bug tracking was not only essential, but way overdue. (Circa March 24, 2006) http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx "After much discussion on the team, we've decided that people are right and that we should have a public way for people to give us feedback or make product suggestions. We wanted to build a system that is searchable and can benefit from the active community that IE has here." So, what's the hold up? If you need a few references for excellent (and mostly free) online bug tracking tools just let us know, we can recommend a few dozen for you that would fit in MS's budget)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Chas: Why don't you use Alt+D?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Hmm. Why didn't this post show up in your RSS feed? This one: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/rss.xml
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
First of all: congratulations. "About friggin' time" - but good to see all the same. Second, given your comments on your particular interpretation of "not breaking the web", has it been decided yet how "IE8 standards mode" will be triggered? If no final decision has been made on this yet (I can only begin to imagine the internal debates - and I imagine a decision might completely depend on just how compatible the final engine will be), is just a regular HTML 4.01 (and XHTML 1.0) strict doctype with system identifier on the table at all? (I've heard noises before that it wouldn't be, but if the new engine is going to be good enough, that position might be reconsidered, ...right?) This is probably going to be the most important issue for web developers; far more important than any minor details on which specific implementation quirks you'll still be suffering from. Please communicate as much as possible about this as soon as possible. Knowing "nothing has been decided yet" really is going to be valuable information for us.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Robbo > passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ... That's why Dean repeatedly stated in his post that ACID2 was merely one of several milestones for IE8. It's nevertheless an important one, and it's very cool that we got an update when it was reached. As I said above, I'd still have wished they'd done a Dave Hyatt-style serie of postings on the progress of IE to ACID2 pass, but... oh well.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
En el blog oficial de Microsoft sobre Internet Explorer, afirman que la versión 8 del navegador que están desarrollando actualmente, pasa el famoso test de compatibilidad ACID 2, creado por el Web Standards Project.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Finally. I'm a Mac-only shop but had to purchase Parallels and copies of Windows XP and Vista to check our compliant websites in IE6 and IE7. It's pretty ridiculous and I'd love to send a bill to Microsoft, but I have a feeling they won't be paying it. I have more costs in my business because of Microsoft, particularly because I demand all of our products are 100% div-based, compliant, and accessible. Quality is important to us and Microsoft should have a vested interest in making our lives easier, for the betterment of the greater Internet. I'm happy IE8 is finally taking steps toward this. The browser is years behind.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Maybe it's one of those every 4 versions thing? Internet Explorer 4 also blew Netscape 4 away when it came to standards-compliance, to be followed by many more iterative versions (not to say IE5 wasn't a good inprovement, it was). I'm afraid though what I find more annoying in modern IE (talking about 7) is the utter lack of standardized browser interface... it's simply a mess, and having been an IE user for a long time before I switched to Firefox, I'm not just saying that 'cause I have a natural dislike against IE. (I could probably go into great length why the IE7 interface is bad, but I guess it's one of those "if you have to ask..." things.) Anyway, congrats on passing this test -- your first link returns a connection time out message right now, by the way. So when is IE8 going to be released?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Chris, There is a program to support developers who want to test out versions of the browsers for free. IE6 and IE7 images are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&DisplayLang=en
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Nice, but it's called "Branch: LONGHORN_IE8", does this mean IE8 will only be released on Vista?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Now I can't wait until you release it at this time next year for Vista only.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@XP User: Don't jump to any conclusions. IE7 built out of the "Longhorn" branch.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
"I'm a Mac-only shop but had to purchase Parallels and copies of Windows XP and Vista to check our compliant websites in IE6 and IE7. It's pretty ridiculous and I'd love to send a bill to Microsoft, but I have a feeling they won't be paying it." I had to buy a Mac a year and half ago to test in Safari. I'd like to send a bill to Apple. Really, what's your point?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations guys, it is a great start and hopefully continues through to many other areas that people believe are missing in IE. It probably won't keep everyone from slamming some aspect of IE, but I'd implore you to keep following this path and eventually (even after this) people will start to realise you are serious. Me, I am just happy there is some competition again - so, about HTML5 :)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well done guys. It's too bad everything had to become secretive, but everyone asked for it by complaining about Vista overpromising. IE7 Pro, by the way, has many good things including inline search (a feature which I would also like to have) as well as crash recovery (which is a necessity). I also wish that there was feedback in the search bar as to what provider is currently selected (if you don't want to copy Firefox's showing an icon, at least add (provider) to the end of the current query, and then remove it when text is selected or a search is performed, similar to the grayed-out text that shows the provider when there is no current query). Not knowing the currently selected search is another big annoyance (the others have been mostly solved by IE7Pro).
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
we have a WPF :D we are ever different :D :D :D
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Cool info, but the goods are all in the video. (info on how you trigger "better" rendering in IE, is abscent, but indicates the following is fixed) Data URL - Now implemented CSS Display Table type properties - fixed/implemented CSS Relative positioning - fixed (shrink to fit) HTML closing p tag - ?? Object fallback now co? HTML abbr tag now fixed CSS generated content - fixed No info given on what is fixed in JavaScript (or what isn't)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is good news. I've never heard of the Acid2 Face before, but just noticed (as have others) that Firefox 2 fails it
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
All I can say is: Thank you. Keep up the good work. Microsoft is practically in a monopoly position and can do whatever it wants. Therefore the problems with IE6 made people hate MS. Now though, I'm already starting to gain my respect for you guys back and I'm sure if this trend continues so will everyone else.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Nice. Thanks. It sure looks like MS is starting to "adapt" and "assimilate" - kinda like the Borg. It was silly to count them out, they were just lumbering along.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx As a team
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is great news, but that "in IE8 standards mode" worries me. What is this "standards mode"? If there's a special mode you have to kick IE8 into before this increased standards compliance takes effect, that's essentially meaningless, because most people won't change the default configuration. So these changes need to be in the most basic, unchanged IE configuration, the one every non-expert Windows users gets. If this is going to be the case and "IE8 standards mode" is something different - then great, and congratulations. Adam Williamson Mandriva
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
It's good that IE is finally catching up to Opera. Let's see if Firefox follows suit...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
What exactly is "IE8 standards mode", is it yet another rendering method that we would have to do something special for to trigger? And that other browser-vendors eventually will have to support in order to be interoperable with IE? Thus hurting both the browservendors that are doing the right thing and standards-aware web-authors as well?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Okay, this will mean nothing to most people out there, but to web developers, particularly those who use standards-based design to maximize compatibility with different browsers, this is monumental. An internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is a great announcement. I will be tempted to use IE much more often than I have been.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome!!! This is great news! :-/ Why do I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, though?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
OMG, Is it fools day? I can't believe, really.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
To be fair to Firefox, v3 will be fully Acid2 compliant (trunk builds have been so for ages). Great to see IE catching up though! I'm intrigued - has the concept of hasLayout gone now?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Hmm, nice picture. Photoshop? ;) Give some beta nightbuild.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Yes... I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, too, and I bet that "IE8 standards mode" is the shoe. If that mode is NOT the default, then it won't matter, because Joe Sixpack won't know to turn it on... and MS can continue to leverage its monopoly.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
> Let's see if Firefox follows suit... Firefox 3 has been rendering Acid2 correctly for ages..
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
ms probably should;d have delayed this till the 25th
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I bet you have to check an option in Internet Options > Advanced > Enable 'Standards Mode' (may slow down overall experience on any computer)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
What a great Christmas present from the I.E team. How ironic that this comes out a week after those whinny people at Opera accuse IE of not supporting web standards. I don't suppose any of the Opera fanboys will be eating their words after reading this. Please keep us posted IE team!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome news! Keep up the great work!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Tino Zijdel: more detail on "IE8 standards mode" in a soon-to-come post. And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode. :)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Good news. Too bad IE6 will still probably be the most used browser and we developers will STILL have to cater to it.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
People, there has been a "Standards" mode and a "Quirks" mode in IE for a couple of versions now. The question is whether this takes over the existing Standards mode or if there is a new IE8 Standard mode in addition to the existing one. Congratulations to Markus, Chris and the IE team for doing the right thing here.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Is this build specially hacked or adjusted to make sure it passes.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The long and short of it: Congratulations!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Wow, this is great news guys! Keep up the good work and I can't wait for MIX ;) Btw, did you get the postcard I sent you? ;)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Tom, it is clearly "adjusted to make sure it passes." That's what code checkins do... :-)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Thanks guys! Make sure you can force it on the world somehow so we can stop targeting all those fools on IE6 :-)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Quit moaning about this standards mode thing. It will be "Standards mode" vs "Quirks mode" where if you're not using a Strict Doctype then you'll get thrown into quirks mode. It's been like that for years. Basically, it the HTML is written correctly, then it'll work correctly.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Good news, although we only see an image, which doesn't proof anything. Anyways, welcome to 2005.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
You should rename a bunch of your source files. Long and case-sensitive filenames are being supported since Windows 95, you know ;-)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
John, There was discussion on the HTML Working Group's email list about doing versioning of HTML (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0612.html, linked from Chris' blog). This makes one wonder if it is "Standards mode" or "IE8 Standards Mode," "Standards Mode," and "Quirks Mode."
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
!!! :) :) :) This announcement exceeded my expectations. My opinion of IE has just improved dramatically.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This post has made me incredibly happy. I remember the last time I read a post on this blog, 85% of the comments were angry demands for Microsoft to take web standards more seriously. This leads me to believe that someone is actually listening to the clamoring of the crowd. Combining that with Dean's proposed brag-when-it's-done philosophy makes me look at IE8 in a very optimistic light. That's something I never before dreamed that I would do. Keep it up.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great news. does IE8 will only be released on Vista or it will also for XP?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well done! This is great news. Please, please, please urge for this to be available on XP — and strongly recommend updating. With a little luck, the nightmare of IE-only stylesheets might pass into legend, where it belongs.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
"MicroKid" -- Basically no browser supported ACID2 in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I'll forgive you, but first I'll need some proof that you've also worked on DOM and SVG support as well. And what about Forms 2.0 and native video/audio tags? APNG?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
i believe ie8 will come in two versions one for vista one for xp (vista having protected mode and stuff) but ie8 will probably be the last version for windows xp
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great news! I hope you will soon also share some good news about improved DOM/JS support in IE8!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
and to other commenters complaining on this thread about IE6 - with all due respect, you're hurting the developer's cause, not helping. we're all frustrated with IE's evolution, but if we don't encourage updates and progress reports like this, and instead rant about prior transgressions every chance we get, our collective voice and influence will be weakened. there's a time and a place for everything.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Bill Gates: "It compiles! Ship it!"
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This looks like great news, though of course it's still early days if the beta's potentially six months off. I'd really like to know what IE8's User Interface is going to be like. Quite frankly, I think IE7's interface changes where an absolute disaster and at least partially responsible for its relatively poor uptake. To paraphrase Dean, "When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the User Interface features that worked before will still work." I'd hope that IE8's changes are more conservative, or offer a choice of an IE6-like UI with the first-run wizard. Even with SP2's reactivation of the menu bar and the recent removal the WGA check, IE7 still has over ten percent less market share than IE6, according to most stats. What is Microsoft going to do to make sure that IE8 becomes relevant quickly? Is it going to be released for XP or will it be Vista-only? Will there be WGA checks? Most importantly, how is Microsoft going to wean people off IE6?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome. Somebody tell Ian Hickson to get ACID3 published, stat!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great - and about time! Now, if only IE wouldn't use twice the memory that Firefox does...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Whilst this may not be something deemed as particularly important by web users, web developers will be
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Isso aí é falso, não é possível!!!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The best news in this entry, from my point of view:
Compatibility with existing content.
User experience.
A possible XP release.
The upcoming beta.
Confirmation that you've been reading the feedback. Personally, I'd be fine with reading IE8's aspirations on this blog. If you make clear what's an aspiration and what's a code check-in, who could that hurt? A great conversation needs more than a good listener, imho.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Like spoon feeding water to a man who has walked the desert for more than a year, news about IE8 has
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
How said IE doesn't support Acid2?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Good work! Posting this from FF and Linux, but I like to keep track of IE progress as I'm tired of pages not working for me. Keep it going. P.S. I strongly urge you add a public bug tracking website. Get those managers convinced as I'm sure the developers and QA-ers would be on-board.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
P.P.S. It'd be nice if you signaled to the user when a webpage was standards compliant (say some nice smiley face somewhere on the address bar or something more innocuous) to encourage people to make their pages compliant.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations to the IE team. This is good news indeed. I won't lie, though: IE 7 should have been what IE 8 is going to be, and web developers aren't at all happy about it. Keep the updates coming, and give us stuff to play with (release early, release often), and you'll find we're generally a forgiving bunch. (Oh, and I'm fairly sure you guys invented the A in AJAX, not the X: given that it's stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, for which XMLHttpRequest is responsible for the former!)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Amazing news, although it is about 5 years late, good news non the less!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
WOW, but is IE still used by anyone?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Pat You're missing the point. Internet Explorer is infamous for holding back progress and technological innovation on the web.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Thanks for your effort guys, let the good times roll!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congrats to the IE team! This is great news for the web...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Can you try my http://okno.n9ery.com/~jacek/LasVegas2007/ in Firefox first (change browser's window size) and then in IE8? IE7 has problems with switching default CSS to alternate when modifying window size. Jack jacek@okno.n9ery.com
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congrats! This is a great step.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congrats. This is good news for all.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Nice work! I think I have last few wishes for IE:

Support for SVG (also in CSS background)
Support for <video> tag (just like experimental Opera and experimental Firefox) with Theora codec
Not using quirks when opening page like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="/css" ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> These 3 above and I'll quite like IE ;)

Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations! IE has transformed itself in the recent years and developers are rejoicing. Well done.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
OK, I lied... I have one more wish ;) Please make IE understand such a CSS: opacity: value;
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Kudos to the team! As far as I'm concerned, and without sarcasm, it's the best piece of news coming out of Microsoft in years. It will impact how millions of web developers work throughout the world. Also please don't forget XP: make the distribution of IE8 as wide as possible, we all need it. But anyhow, for now it's... champagne!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
For you firefox 3 fanboys you may want to check again Firefox 3 Beta 1 is no longer compliant.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
It's about time. Although, everyone said IE7 was going to be just as good as FireFox in rendering CSS1 and some CSS2 (it's not). So I'm certainly not holding my breath. Fix the peek-a-boo bug for IE8 and we'll talk. Also, force users to update. As much as I love having two stylesheets to accommodate IE6 users, I'd like to not be forced into using three. Oh, and give us a Firebug. Something lightyears better than IE Web Developer Toolbar.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone これでOperaの訴えの根拠の1つはなくなることになりますね。ちなみにIE9のコードネームはTritonのようです。
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Cher Stewart by the time ie8 is out ie6 will be at about 5 percent market share
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
By the way, to the moron who ranted about only seeing a screenshot here, go watch the video posted at: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=367207
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Bravo. This shows a major shift in Microsoft's philosophy and priorities and I welcome it. Good job on a major achievement and one giant step for making web developers lives easier. I spend 50% of my time just making things work right in IE6.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone(IE Blog)より IE7 が Acid2 のテストをパスするというマイルストーンを通過したようです。
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congrats on passing Acid2. Nice job. There are a few comments posted here indicating that IE6 is still dominant. I don't think so. I posted some stats this week showing that IE7 is now dominant -- at least with the data I've collected. http://blogs.lotterypost.com/speednet/2007/12/ie7-has-now-overtaken-ie6.htm I have grown accustomed to the IE7 interface, and I hope it doesn't change too much in IE8.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations! That is an important milestone to be proud of. Hopefully there will be many more as things progress.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I guess the Microsoft Internet Explorer team took the developer complaints about lack of Internet Explorer 8 information to heart. Today, much reviled Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch took to the Microsoft IEBlog to report that the
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations! About time you guys too standards seriously and not went off on your own merry way making up stuff as you went along. Should we really applaud this new and it's mention all over the web? No.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
"Rafał Miłecki wrote: OK, I lied... I have one more wish ;) Please make IE understand such a CSS: opacity: value; " I would love to see that too. The alpha filter works horribly with (semi)transparent images like GIF, PNG24 and PNG32.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
That's great that IE8 will support standards, but no one in the company I work for will use it as long as Vista is the required operating system.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Wait... what the? I was just <a href="http://www.gabrielmcgovern.com/blog/2007/12/19/all-i-want/">writing about how all I wanted for x-mas</a> was a standards complaint version of Internet Explorer!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Wait... what the? I was just writing about how all I wanted for x-mas was a standards complaint version of Internet Explorer! Try this one instead: http://www.gabrielmcgovern.com/blog/2007/12/19/all-i-want/
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Chris Wilson You opened up a can of worms indicating that you are accepting feedback. 1.) Where are you accepting feedback, I have not seen a url posted on this blog for feedback since the IE Feedback site, which of course has been dead for over a year. 2.) Same question as 1. 3.) Same question as 2. 4.) Same question as 3. 5.) Seriously, where is it! We've only been complaining about this for 5 years now. dom
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
GOOD JOB!!! THIS IS GREAT NEWS, KEEP UP THE GOOD JOB!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Gabriel, don't except it for Christmas...unless you mean maybe next Christmas.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations on the milestone. I remember of myself complaining abou this two years ago... Congrats
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Excellent, thank you!!! Please tell us that next on the list is proper Javascript support.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I have left just about everything MS behind in my home life out of frustration from what it does to my professional life. I am not here to criticize, I just want to say that I am glad that IE is shooting for better standards compliance. A2 is a great step forward. I hope that it isn't the end though. Good work!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!!! This could save me hundreds of hours of work each year. Thanks for making a commitment to CSS with this release!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Microsoft does conduct feedback - through IE error reports. Duh. Good job IE team. I know IE8 must be really something big, or else you guys wouldn't be keeping it such a secret :) I'm guessing that IE8 will try to vie for the "Best browser award", and I hope that you try your hardest to keep up to it.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Dean, Chris, time for a frank talk with the dev community on the IE Blog. Standards vs. Quirks, will allow us to ensure that IE8 Renders things the way we expect (or at least way better) in IE8, by triggering Standards mode (however it is done, I don't care, and I'm ready to start coding for it) But (yeah, there is always a but...) The majority of fixes that we are waiting for in IE8 are JavaScript/DOM based. The JavaScript bugs in IE6 (and IE7) occur REGARDLESS of Standards or Quirks mode. What we need to openly discuss (whether you've decided how you are implementing it or not), is what the plan is to ensure the correct implementations are called when we call methods, etc. If it hasn't been carved in stone, may I suggest the following. 1.) Ok, since this is to fix JS, the trigger should be in JS. 2.) Missing implementations can just be added (they won't break anything) 3.) The trigger really only needs to therefore be on methods that were implemented correctly... 3.a) For each method being fixed (since it is an object too), add an expando property to it. e.g. //use fixed version if(document.getElementById){ document.getElementById._complyWithSpec = true;//tell IE to use the fixed implementation } 3.b) Presuming that prototyping on HTMLElements will also be fixed, the spec flag for methods can be placed there also. e.g. //use fixed version if(HTMLElement){ HTMLElement.getElementsByName._complyWithSpec = true;//tell IE to use the fixed implementation } 4.) For those of us that want all fixes, with no fuss a global flag would be nice. e.g. //fix all of IE's implementations if(window.external){ window.external._globalComplyWithSpec = true; } I realize that whatever the approach, it is difficult to implement, but I do want to assure you that we most certainly WANT the corrected versions, and if I have to have a CC with a few lines to get IE into shape I'll HAPPILY do so! jasper
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
It's about time MS does something right for a change. I just hope its as standards compliant in both HTML and CSS as Safari and Firefox are. And also make this both an XP and Vista release because IMO Vista is terrible, but I use OS X anyways. My guess is by the time IE8 is acutally released Firefox will be in version 4 and, once again, IE will be lacking behind.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
How about the nose color change and suppressed scroll bars?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Hey IE Team, please visit this site using your new build of the rendering engine and see how many of these you fixed using IE 8: http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome news. Good job! I'm anxiously awaiting the IE 8 beta cycle (and accompanying bug-reporting/feedback site, right?)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@WebHacker-- check out the video to see the nose and behavior.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well, all I can say to the older members of the team is shame on you. I, and many thousands of others have spent longer than you can imagine working around IE bugs. I doubt you'll ever truly realise what a terrible terrible job you've done and how helish you've made people's lives. Seriously. Many thanks to the person who finally saw sense and lead the team to making IE8 compatible with CSS standards.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Sonu Kapoor "Thats great. I just made the test with Firefox and it failed." Yeah, I tried the test with IE7 and it failed as well. Think this guy's lying about IE passing the test?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Meeting the standard is one thing, but actually changing your product proves to one and all that you're actually listening! That's the coolest part of this achievement in my books. You mention compatibility with older formats, what's stopping you from providing multiple rendering engines, and letting the user choose from a set of thumbnails the output they like best? If you had a feedback process similar to the anti-phishing tool, IE could offer the thumbnails based on domain/URL as needed. That one's for free guys, no strings attached. Nice job on Acid2.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well done, indeed! Now I can't wait for the announcement that DOM Level 2 is also supported...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The IE team has been very hard at work on IE 8 for the past several months and they hit a huge milestone
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Thanks IE team! > which standards are the most > important for us to support? Improved CSS support will of course be good, but experienced web developers can already work around the bugs. The standards I most want supported are SVG, and the new html5 canvas and video elements. cheers,
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well slap me with a moldy turnip and colour me flabbergasted! Who would've thought. If IE8 - when released - still complies with W3C standards to the same degree or better than Safari, Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera, then I'll be pleased. I've spent too many hours cursing Microsoft's name doing workarounds for IE6 and IE7 to consider it fait accompli. I just think it's a sad thing that Microsoft are receiving praise for doing something that everyone knows they should've done 5-7 years ago... I'll be pleased when I can look back on this day in 5 years and see that Microsoft has about-faced and started making compliance with relevant open standards (and I'm not including MSOOXML in that) a requirement for release. All the best, Dave
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Rocjoe: That's not exactly a great idea. :/
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I doubt you'll get a chance to reply to me individually, but I'd be VERY curious to see how your new builds of IE8 perform on the CSS selector test here: http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/ ...if you actually get a chance to run it I'd love to hear the results. My email is xxdesmus @ Google's email service. Regards, and great work guys. Keep it up!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great job guys, keep up the great work. I really appreciate all of the work you put into passing the test.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Keep on trying until you reach the level of firefox!! ;) http://www.spymac.com/details/?2315603
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
xxdesmus, cool tests, for others enjoyment, here's what I got: firefox 2.0.0.11: From the 43 selectors 26 have passed, 10 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 357 out of 578 tests) konqueror 3.5.6: From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests) opera 9.23: From the 43 selectors 25 have passed, 3 are buggy and 15 are unsupported (Passed 346 out of 578 tests)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Those of us who are "real" developers, we realize Acid2 is not that significant and any browser vendor can tweak their code to make it pass. But this does not make a browser compliant with anything overall and Dean alludes to this in his comments. Another red flag is this "which standards should we support?" comment. Right away Dean is opening the door for "Microsoft Windows" compliant items that are not friendly to any other browser or operating system. I can't possibly know what IE8 holds in store, or when we'll actually see this thing, but Microsoft has never been forthcoming or trustworthy in the past and there is no reason to believe they will now.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I find it hilarious to hear MS is complaining about how IE7 renders sites correctly if you change the user-agent string so that the site doesn't think it's internet explorer. Something ironic about it. :) So... since your developers can have both IE7 and IE8 natively on their systems, can we PLEASE get them as stand alone and not force us to run VMs?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Whoa. Just––whoa. Here's yet another guy who can't wait for IE8 to be on most IE-using PCs.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
> While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better Wait. Could this mean, that IE8 will be open source? Sounds like it would be the most impressing and clever action MS could do. Though, step by step. Thank for working on the CSS-front!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is very good news. I'm hoping in the future it will allow me to spend less time trying to develop cross browser compliant CSS and Javascript.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
It's good news. I expect that Microsoft releases IE8 to Windows XP SP3. I fear that Microsoft releases IE8 to Vista.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Three words: public bug tracking.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Since no one has brought it up PLEASE implement border-radius!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Amazing work, IE team! Developers have been ranting about this for a long time, and it finally passes the test! You've made great strides, and it seems that you want to continue down that path. Keep up the good work!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Amazing work, IE team! Developers have been ranting about this for a long time, and it finally passes the test! You've made great strides, and it seems that you want to continue down that path. Keep up the good work!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
"Hmm odd that the test would quit working in Opera and Safari the same day this is posted. Seems like the w3 test has probably been bought off by Microsoft." Wait ... What?! ... I .. I just confirmed this .. The ACID2 test just worked in Opera a couple days ago, it's not working now.. I can't believe it!! Did the test get stricter, or was it hacked just for Microsoft to pass the test?!!!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is great news. Finally I can have a smiley face on my web site.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Much too late, but THANK YOU for finally deciding it's not worth having thousands of web developers hating you.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Web developers around the world are raising their voices in cheer today because of the IEBlog's grand announcement: Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID2 Test. Readers of this blog who are not web designers are probably wondering what all the...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Can someone explain why it is that the same day IE8 passes the Acid2 test, WebKit/KHTML/Opera/FF3 are all suddenly failing the test? All of those were previously confirmed to have passed the test. Was the test changed to accommodate IE8? And secondly, how did the test change?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Will I finally be able to stop cursing IE? I know we are a long way off from a release but I am optimistic based on the news today. I've estimated IE6/7 costs the web development industry well over $1Billion per year due to lost productivity (debugging IE CSS rendering and creating work arounds specifically for IE). I long for the day when I can write code once and 'just have it work' across browsers. It is just a shame that it took so long for: a) the IE team to be resurrected b) to begin embracing standards in earnest I weep for the my many lost development hours over the past several years because IE stagnated in a broken state. Congrats on the ACID2 test. andre
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I will never be a Microsoft user, but I'm very happy to see you're finally working with the standards world instead of trying to "be" the standards world. Congratulations and keep up the good work.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
And so it continues. The endless posts by people who claim to be "developers" and praise this announcement but, instead, only show what they don't know. Passing Acid2 means nothing. It's cute. And it's like putting those little W3C logos saying "Validates HTML4.01!" but little beyond that. Microsoft has shown you nothing. It's words hidden behind words. No product shown. No proof of concept. No "Look what we fixed!". No nothing. Only words.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I have been very critical of IE in the past, but his is very good news. Congratulations and thank you!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
you know, the smiley face is way too far to the right in your picture there. So, either, iE8 doesn't pass, or thats a big fat fake.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Oh at last, you have decided to go with the standards.. Well done... This releives us(web developers) a lot..
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The Acid2 test is currently broken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 Of course, that assumes the interested parties haven't been f*cking with the data: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I long for the day when I can embed images into web pages, as Acid2 does with base64, and slap it on an ie window and say ooh, shiny. I guess my dream starts coming true July. Acid2 ain't even close to everything, and everyone and their mom seems to have figured it out at this point, but it's still a big step forward. Well done.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Dealing with Microsoft is like pulling teeth. No, I don't share all the hoopla generated by earlier comments since key questions have yet to be answered. Will IE8 be available for XP? Will IE8 be unnecessarily integrated into the OS (yet again)? As is the custom with Microsoft, we'll probably not find out until a day before the release as they continue to plot their next move. Keeping businesses and consumers in the dark is always a sound move - because none of us are capable of planning more than a few days in advance. We love surprises and the possibility of another forced OS upgrade looming over our heads.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Internet Explorer 8 a trecut testul Acid2! Toată știrea AICI .
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
So let me see if I got this straight. This is actually achieved by proper use of CSS, right? It is not hardcoded (if (url == acid2_test_url) {displaySmileyFace();}), right? I think I'm going to cry for joy.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Internet Explorer 8のBeta版、2008年前半にリリースタグ : Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone (IEBlog) While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better. We will have...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Awesome. Great news, and sincere congrats for that development.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is awesome news!!! Thank you so much.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Very glad to see some news about IE8, I can't wait to hear more, please keep us posted. However... "we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly." Bzzzt, WRONG! http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
"It's good that IE is finally catching up to Opera. Let's see if Firefox follows suit..." Firefox has been able to do that since december 2006.. internet explorer 8 is the 4th browser beeing able to render this test correctly
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
In other news: Opera 9 and I think 8 passed this aswell... Looks like Safari 3 doesn't.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Well done, IE team. Better very very late than never. Does this mean that all future IE releases will be compliant with the standards as defined at the time of development or can we look forward to a similar timescale for CSS3 support (when CSS3 is actually agreed, anyway)?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
awesome guys... and thanks! Appreciate this a lot.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great progress :) This is very good. I am editor of some websites and I am VERY tired of using mye budget on errorfixing because of bad standards support. Lets hope MS makes it easy and necessary for people to upgrade. Push IE8 hard please! Play the climatecard and calculate how standardsupport means less development time that leads to less heating/cooling of the office and so on.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I can't believe it!! congratulations IETeam! I will be very happy with the advantages that this release bring to us, the webelopers. Thanks to take our demands into consideration :)
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
You can't imagine how happy this makes me. I am creating a modern public web application for schools in Sweden. We spend a lot of time debugging problems and dumbing down the application for Internet Explorer and other broken browsers. Internet Explorer 7 was a step in the right direction, but in reality it just added one more quirky browser to the list of browsers we have to support. Therefore this early information on Internet Explorer 8 is very good news. I hope Microsoft will be very aggressive in pushing updates to users so we can drop support for IE6 and 7 quickly. Thank you guys! This has given me hope for the future of the web. Regards, Martin Olsson
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
A bit ironic how the Acid2 test page breaks right when the IE team announces it finally passes it. :p (In other words, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3 all fail the test currently, due to a temporary problem with the page) Anyway, I'm glad this finally happened... No matter what else you decide to add to IE8 later on, I hope you'll seriously encourage IE6 and 7 users to upgrade to IE8 (more so than you tried to push IE7), so as to end web developer nightmares as soon as possible.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Thanks, and congratulations! :) Eivind.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is great news - I hope you're planning to include some of the key new web standards, like HTML5 elements. The most important things in my opinion are CANVAS, SVG, better CSS support, more DOM support, and support for the newer versions of JavaScript. VIDEO could wait as Firefox 3 won't have it, but it'll be important in a year or so.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Excellent work guys. Well done.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Congratulations, you passed a two-year old semi-test, that shows you've gotten a few of the "wishlist" items to work correctly. Now, if you can pull off actual and full CSS2.1 and DOM3 support, I might be impressed.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I can't believe it! Also please don't forget XP: make the distribution of IE8 as wide as possible, we all need it.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is very good news. I'm hoping in the future it will allow me to spend less time trying to develop cross browser compliant CSS and Javascript.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Year5.org -- March on the 5th Anniversary of the War Help Make History on the 5th Anniversary of the War - March on DC, March 15th 2008. (tags: march15 2008 antiwar demonstration answer march dc washingtondc war anniversary) CSS Text Wrapper Will likely
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
all ie users must thank FIREFOX! if there was no competition from FF, ie users will still be using ie6! microsoft develops ie only when there is a direct compition. ie1-ie6 competition from netscape! sleep of 3 years ie7-ie8 competition from Firefox!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
This is the very best news of the year! Thanks for making the web more interoperable and standarized
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Which is great. But I wonder what, if any, interesting new things layout hackers or Dean Edwards can work out about the internals of IE from the list of touched files in the IE Blog blogpost?...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
¿Microsoft standard? Incredible... www.juzamdjinn.blogspot.com
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Does IE8 grok application/xml+xhtml yet?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
I think this is great news. A huge step in the right direction. Any chance of making IE8 a critical update? So we don't have to cater for IE6 anymore.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
You are right I can't run XP and IE 6 forever. www.apple.com/getamac But I think I have found a better OS. I'm Josh, and I'm soon to be a switcher.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Plue says: http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb274/steppres/ieerror.jpg is more like it!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
@Rob "And so it continues. The endless posts by people who claim to be "developers" and praise this announcement but, instead, only show what they don't know. Passing Acid2 means nothing. (...)" That sounds both arrogant and ignorant. As far as I am concerned, it means at the very least that generated content (:before, :after) is finally supported, and that alone is quite nice.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
You mean it now shows the reference image properly!? ;) I can't believe it...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Op deze glorieuze dag heeft het IE team namelijk succesvol Internet Explorer een Acid2 pagina laten renderen
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Momentan ist der Internet Explorer 8 in Entwicklung und schon gibt es in Richtung Standards Compliance
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Kudos on the Acid2 test, big milestone, you should all be proud. I do have a question though, it would be on my IE8 wishlist to have direct .NET compatibility, whereby you could create IE extensions directly in .NET without having to do all the COM interop. Is this likely to happen. It would be great if IE8 had a sandbox .NET environment to build into :D
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The CSS2 display:table-cell support in IE8 is GREAT news! Thank you. Will it crawl into IE7 too?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Internet Explorer 8 supera il test Acid2: un evento storico!
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
If you are going to keep a backward compatibility, then let the website developers somehow switch this web-standards mode on.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Good news! Congratulations! Now if you could support SVG as well it would be very cool. Yours' is the last browser not supporting natively. I keep my fingers crossed ...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
The test is compromised since Opera and Firefox do not pass it and IE8 does. Tell us, IE developers, how much did you pay to the acid2 authors for the modification for your browser only?
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Okay, thanks for the file list, now where can I download the beta? Not that I don't believe what you say or anything...
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
Great, when Firefox 6 is out and rendering Acid4 in 2012, IE8 will STILL be 5 years behind the times.
Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 19, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Woah! Congratulations guys, that’s fantastic news. Well done.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
You say in the channel 9 video that if you change the UA string and feed content to IE that was supposed to be for, say, Firefox that it renders better than in IE. Can't you just tweak the UA string then? Any old sniffers will still work with old browsers, but won't affect the new browser. Also: can we get a public bug tracker please? Another thing I'd love to see is a good debugger for seeing what IE is balking on when I feed it my code, akin to the error console on Firefox.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Μια έκτακτη είδηση προκάλεσε
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Awesome news ! Congratulation guys.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Les développeurs d'IE 8 étaient jusqu'à présent très silencieux. Ils se sont réveillés récemment et ont
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Thanks guys. I think I feel a glimmer of hope!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
@Code is poetry It's been over a year that Firefox (trunk) passes the Acid2. Try to get your facts straight before misinforming people.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
I hope you will release rendering engine standalone for pre-XP systems!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Good stuff! Any news on SVG capabilities? Thanks
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Great work. IE8 should be Vista only.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Any chance IE8 will better the support for two-letter domain names in cookies? Perhaps using some of the already known methods which most other browsers use?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Excellent News perhaps the CSS only popout menus on my web site will work in IE8. They have worked in Gecko engine for awhile now, but not in IE. (Actually they did work one of the IE 7 betas, but then they broke again.) now could you address the whole issue of needing to detect the browser and send javascript code down different paths to achive the same effects?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Okay... I know it's definitely slower than most folks would like it to be, but the curtain is slowly
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Wow, amazing milestone! Now pack it with faster tabbed browsing, a better interface unlike v7, built in mouse gestures and adblocker, compatibility with Firefox addons and I might... might switch.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Echoing the laundry list of user requests, I'd love to see you guys introduce an event to support showModalDialog (KB251128).
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Thanks for your effort. Just a question from many web developers: will you drop the support to the hasLayout property? This surely helps, instead of having two different layout engines on the same browser. thanks again. Gabriele ps. if you support generated content, see http://www.css-zibaldone.com/test/#generate
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
when are they thinking of launching it...?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Good news for IE users ;) Competion between navigators will continue then !
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Here : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480 we can see that all browsers no longer pass the test. Because there is an issue on the server hosting the test. So, if IE8 passes the test.. then it don't passes the test. When the IE team did the screenshot... ? :)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Dudes! That's sweet! I'd just been wondering what you were up to with IE8... and I'm thrilled to see you've passed this interoperability milestone. Keep on blogging...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Will IE8 also support RFC 2397? All other browsers already do. Would be great if this would be compatible, too...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
ill pay 400 dollars for vista ultimate ok id pay over 1000 dollars for vista starter edition without ie (just to get an idea of how much id like to not have ie) if there was a way to remove ie id pay for it
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congratulations team, that was quite a surprise!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
SVG could open up a whole new range of development on the web.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Can I request a feature? I will do it anyway...mkae the Search bar movable....Thanks.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
It's good to see this work done, but it would've been better to have twice as many posts with half as much in them. Let us know what your next milestone is and the progress being made on it. This is great news and I myself am happy to hear it, but it doesn't quite cover the bitter taste of all the silence up to this point. Let us know what work is being done on the DOM. Let us know that JScript is finally going to become JavaScript/ECMA compliant. Let us know all the CSS2 things that have been fixed and what CSS3 things are being considered for addition. Let us know the direction you're taking IE and what progress has been made even if it's just making baby steps this week. Any information about IE heading in the right direction is good information. With how much catch up IE has to do and how well documented the standards are it's not like working towards them is something that needs to be done in secret. Make sure IE8 isn't Vista only too. I know too many people personally who would view it as the last straw and leave MS products entirely for Linux or Mac, and given their wide diversity I imagine that a Vista only IE8 would cost more customers than even MS can afford to lose.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Good job in doing what was expected by people for years. I was completely siding with Opera in their claims in front of the EU, having a major market share in browsers should force you to abide to the W3C standards more than anybody else, otherwise you are creating de facto standards. Let's hope for you that you will continue in this path...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Wow... and now, exterminate IE6!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
That is indeed a milestone. Congrats!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
This is Good News. Note to 簡德瑞: I also just noticed the failure of Moz3 and Safari3 and Opera9 on the acid2 test. Here's a picture: http://tinyurl.com/2o4u3e As to UI: I agree with the poster above who noted that if you don't know what's wrong with the IE7 UI already, you're not a competent UI person. If I were a 'softie hiring for the IE UI team, it'd be one of my early interview filtration questions. Please have someone take some good long looks at Opera/Safari/FF/IE6, and then at least give us large chunks of UI customization controls for IE8. For example, a UI that allows for emulation of all of those other browsers' UI would be indicative of strength in this area. -- stan krute
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Stanley Krute, can you please read the comments before yours ? You said : "I also just noticed the failure of Moz3 and Safari3 and Opera9 on the acid2 test". Yes, of course, the test is broken... So IE8 doesn't passed the test (until we got a real proof this day).
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
This is good news, and I think you guys should work on reaching a sooner release date for IE8. You want to make developers happy? Then force people using IE6 to upgrade. Now. You know darn well that they should not be using it, so go on, do us all a favor (already).
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Milestones still left:

Public bug tracking interface
Ability to run different versions of IE side-by-side, and not use a time-locked image of Windows (come on, how convenient do you really think that is?) So you passed a test. Whoopie. To paraphrase Deon Sanders when talking about the 2007 Miama Dolphins finally winning a game: So what? They did what they were supposed to do. You all are celebrating something that has been done to death by every other single web browser out there. The IE team is just now starting to catch up, and the whole world is supposed to throw them a ticker-tape parade? Puh-lease. Oh no! My negativity is going to force the IE team to not tell us anything substantial in the future!!! How is that any different than now or before? Can't miss what we've never really had. I would be impressed if the IE team actually turned out a web browser that didn't force me to run three different computer systems, or some jacked-up/hacked-up copy just so I can make sure that a stupid little div didn't just break my entire website (W3C compliant or not). Of course the community is bitter. You kick us in the teeth with every version release, turn your backs on us when we beg for help, and then act like you're some messiah because you passed some stupid little test that has no real-world application.

Anonymous
December 20, 2007
That's awesome! Congrats! Now all we need is something comparable to firebug, and some javascript error messages that actually mean something, and we'll be all set (great start though).
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
As Josh said: Please, please, please make IE8 a part of XP SP3 and the next Service Pack for Vista so that people are forced to upgrade. And please let IE8 switch to the standards compliant mode even if there's an XML declaration if the doctype is HTML 4 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict... Apart from that I'm glad about every single change towards more standards compliance.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
In regards to keeping compatibility with existing website; how will this affect the strict doctype. Will rendering bugs while in strict mode be addressed, or will they be kept due to compatibility issues? What I'd really hope for is that strict rendering is updated to keep with the standards even if some sites might break. And leave the backwards compatibility for the transitional mode. (quirks mode)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
@Andrei Stoleru: Linux and Mac are nice, yeah, but try to be a little realistic. Everyone won't leave Windows all of a sudden for no reason. A forced upgrade to IE8 would probably be good for both webmasters and IE users. I wish IE8 would be included in XP SP3, too... But won't SP3 be ready long before IE8 ?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Per chi non lo conoscesse l'Acid2 è uno dei test più affidabili per verificare l'aderenza dei browser agli standard, in particolare per ciò che riguarda il Per ora l'unico browser in grado di superare tale test è Opera ( F
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congrats, you guys have been pretty quiet, but apparently very very busy. Acid2 may not be the definititive test, but it certainly is a major milestone along the way. More standards compliance is always an excellent thing. I'm looking forward to IE8! (any chance you'll natively support svg so I don't have to move to firefox when I need that?)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congratulations! Now how about moving on to some other W3C standards: SVG, SMIL, XForms, XBL...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
I'll believe it when I download it. But if this is true, Microsoft will have earned some respect for IE, instead of scorn. Thanks for promissing this at least.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
"IE8 standards mode" this seems to be very careful phrasing. could you explain why you chose to use this phrase rather than just "standards mode" ? is "IE8 standards mode" something different than just using a proper doctype and valid code? does one invalidating error (say as caused by included content from a CMS or something) cause the browser to go in to "IE 6 Quirks Mode" all over again? in other words: will this matter in the wild?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Good stuff. Now can you stop misleading your customers into thinking that IE is the only browser, or that IE is "the web"? Thanks ;)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
@sw "Support generated content, like Opera and Firefox do. It's very useful for styling notes, list items and hyperlinks." This is already in, else it couldn't pass the Acid2 test. And of course, I'm also all for native SVG support in IE... I'm very interested in it, and will end up using it sooner or later.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Chris Corwin, "IE8 Standards Mode" Yes, that caught my eye, too. I don't know what that means either. With Microsoft, you always have to question everything.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
The beta has no firm release date yet, but it has already passed the Acid2 Browser Test, ensuring that
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
If only you had started listening earlier, could have saved a lot of years of pain. Well, better late than never. Congrats - this is most encouraging.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
It looks like you have granted my first (and most critical) wish for IE8, and I'm so happy to hear it. I certainly hope this test is passed as a result of standards compliance, and not just gearing your renderer towards showing the right thing to benchmarks. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new browser and trying it out now that I've seen this. I have only two other things to ask:

Please, please, please, PLEASE release this browser as a critical update for everything back to Win2K. We really need to get every Windows user on this newest version for the impact to be felt.
Once you've caught up to the pack, keep IE current. All your work to date will quite literally be for nothing if you allow the new browser to languish for 6 years like IE6 did, hobbling developers and slighting users. Thanks again IE Team, enjoy your holidays, and please keep up the hard work.

Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Et xforms ? svg ? vont-ils être supportés en natif par ie8 ?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
As a web designer I'm really please to hear this news. However, I can't for ie8!!! Can't you roll out the new engine as quickly as possible in ie7.5, for the sake of fixing the web. This will also give time to have pages rendering correctly under standard XHTML/CSS spec without any special ie8 only code additions. It also means we can scrap any ie7.0 fixes when 7.5 is released as it should be an auto update. ie6 is a concern too. When i build websites, they're all sitting in their office looking at them on ie6, which is hellish!!! Maybe a render engine update for ie6 as well if possible? No exclusive IE8 tags to make it render correctly either. Just make the web work as it should. It's about time people started to upgrade anyway.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
5O WH4+? Ie 1s @nd WILl 83 4 CR4ppY brOW53r.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
if( ACID2 == TRUE) useFakeSmileyRender(); else useNormalCrappyCSSParser()
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
En nära vän frågade mig idag om det hade hänt något nytt på webbstandardfronten på sistone, och den första tanken om for genom mitt huvud var"hur i hela friden skall jag kunna sammanfatta det här i några korta meningar".Det enda...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
congrats. this is really exciting. sadly, Acid2 didn't pass on my mac firefox.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Smiling Acid2 face = smiling Developer face. Thanks for the good news.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Given the number of requests for svg here, can we atleast get a yes or no on svg support? I know we can't expect a lot of detail but give us something guys....
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Uh, I can´t belive it :-) It´s good news.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
My sincere congratulations for your hard work. I hope you (i.e. you IE developers) are allowed to continue along these lines.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Im sorry, I thinking this is terrible news! Now MS wanst to bow to presure to whiny dvelopers? W3 has no busines telling MS what to do... ...! terrible!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congratulations! You probably have redeemed a LOT of karma for IE as a whole based solely on this achievement :)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
shock shock shock! can't believe ;-)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
My response and a suggestion for Chris Wilson on how to trigger standards mode in IE8, best wishes and luck with all the work everyone is doing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N19ouRblPjE Also please feel free to test IE8 on my site. I've got plenty of bandwidth so burn it up all you want! You can disable the secondary stylesheet intended to patch rendering issues by using the ?browserpatch=0 or ?ieccss=0 HTTP queries... http://www.jabcreations.com/home/home-news.php?browserpatch=0 Thanks for the post!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
"Microsoft announced Wednesday it has passed an early milestone for the next version of its iconic Internet
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Any idea of the canvas tag will be implimented in IE8? I would very much like to know this.. it is supported in all other major browsers. Google has a bandaid for current IE to make the canvas tag work, but is very slow and not the same as a real hard-coded canvas tag.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
"Microsoft announced Wednesday it has passed an early milestone for the next version of its iconic
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congratulations guys, As you have said, this is first milestone, there are still issues there will have to be resolved, such as Javascript and HTML speed, multi pipelining and such. Still as start, good work. Ofcourse Firefox guys who actually thinks it already passes test should re-test their beta2 again.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
That's fantastic! Does this mean IE8 handles "margin: 0 auto;" correctly now?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
cwilso said: "more detail on "IE8 standards mode" in a soon-to-come post. And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode. :)" Yes Chris, I know, but that's not what I meant. I was asking what it would take for webdevelopers to get that same behaviour in IE8. The talk here about "not breaking backwards compatibility" does suggest some kind of opt-in switch (as you've suggested yourself before), which I feel is something that doesn't help interoperability and punishes authors that are trying to do the right thing. How about the possibility to run IE8 alongside IE7/6? That would partly solve the backwards-compatibility problem (people can revert to an older version of IE, especially for intranet apps that are known to rely heavily on IE quirks and proprietary features), and as an extra bonus it would be a huge benefit for authors that for years to come will still have to cater for older versions of IE. Secondly I wonder what is meant by "the right set of standards". Will IE8 only implement subsets of some standards, or implement some standards as a whole and dismiss some others? How about DOM and JavaScript? How about CSS3 features that are already CR? How about upcoming features from HTML5 such as <canvas> that already have support in other browsers? Although it is good to have news about IE8 this post leaves more questions than answers.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Passing Acid2 is no assurance that IE does much of anything different than it does now.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Not to be rude, but Acid2 is not a COMPLIANCE test, it is a FAILURE test. It shows that the browser processes BAD HTML and CSS code nicely. That it fails in such a way as to leave the page readable. If a browser "fails" the Acid2 test, it means that when it encounters bad HTML/CSS, it barfs up the page rather than failing nicely. Yes, it's nice to know that IE8 will "pass", but I'd rather make sure that pages with PROPER HTML/CSS code are rendered nicely, without requiring IE-specific workarounds, as it common now. There are many websites, including very major ones, where code is hand-tuned so that "correct" HTML/CSS is bypassed when IE is detected, because IE is known to not render it correctly. What I would like is for pages to "Let iCab smile", with no browser-specific code, to render correctly on IE.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Congratulations Microsoft. This is the first post from this blog that's put a smile on my face, that's two in one day:).
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
I just happen to think of something. This is NOT IE8 that passed this test. This isn't even IE8 Beta. Not even IE8 Alpha. This is some internal build that they made pass the test. This is NOT the build you will use. This is NOT the build that Beta will use; perhaps not even Alpha. Here's the question, Dean. Will IE8 Release pass Acid2 whenever it comes out?
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Returning for a moment after a long while… Thanks :) This makes the web developer in me quite happy! I do quite agree with what the comment “Thursday, December 20, 2007 10:01 PM by anonymous” says; I too like applications that fit in my GUI (I typically use the classic theme in XP, but currently a Zune inspired one, for example — neither of which is really something IE7 would fit in). And I also would love to see Win2k support at least — it was an awesome OS (if not the best ever to come from Microsoft), and there are a lot of people still using it for various reasons. Anyway; thanks for getting the Acid2 right :) Also fun to see some source file names, that doesn’t happen often!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
If the adoption rates for IE8 are going to mirror the ones of IE7 it's going to be looong wait before most of the public is going to install a decent browser from Microsoft. Thanks Firefox and Opera for forcing MS to give a rat's behind about "standards" after so many years. Hey, in software, money can't beat talent and dedication. And you guys have just money.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
CSS-hacking or screenshot of this page http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.html ? =)
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
I m web developer and i hate IE.Now with IE8 hmm...CSS,XHTML,png TRANSPARENCY long shot for windows....keep up good work and good luck with IE8...
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Ping Back: http://blogs.dotnethell.it/vincent/IE-Team-annuncia-Windows-Internet-Explorer-8-Beta-1.__12543.aspx Congrats, Team.
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Ping Back: http://blogs.dotnethell.it/vincent/IE-Team-annuncia-Windows-Internet-Explorer-8-Beta-1.__12543.aspx Thanks Team!
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Sounds good, hope to test the beta soon
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
IE团队高兴的宣称：2007年12月12日星期三，Internet Explorer在IE8标准模式下正确的渲览了 Acid2 测试。支持Acid2所测试的特性们有多种理由，但这是IE团队在IE8中承诺的互操作性，符合标准，向后兼容性中的一个重要里程碑。
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
כנראה שאיחלנו ליום הזה יותר מדי, היום שבו המשיח יגיע והכל יסתדר , זאב יגור עם כבש אנשים ישליכו את החרבות
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
IE团队高兴的宣称：2007年12月12日星期三，Internet Explorer在IE8标准模式下正确的渲览了 Acid2 测试。支持Acid2所测试的特性们有多种理由，但这是IE团队在IE8中承诺的互操作性
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
How about full XHTML compliance with the browser
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
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Anonymous
December 20, 2007
now do this one http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html this is konqueror's result http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cssck2.png
Anonymous
December 20, 2007
Turkish: Şu İnternet Explorer 8'i çıkarsanızda kullansak! :) SDN= MSDN
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
>this is konqueror's result The same as Opera 9.5.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Firefox 3 Beta has been able to pass the Acid2 Test since 2006! pfff...
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Cool , when do IE6 and 7 will pass the test...
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
so when IE8 comes out it will finally be where it should have been from the start...when is IE8 coming out? because i'm thinking being 5 years behind compliance isn't really going to help developers that much. but i guess i will be able to use those designs i did in 2005 and 2006...just have to sit on them a few more years. w00t?
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
just make sure ie8 drops as a critical update again.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
somebody from team plz invite me to IE8, i will not tell anyone :D
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Si c'est av�r�, c'est un pas de g�ant qu'Internet Explorer est en train d'accomplir sur le chemin du respect des standards du Web, notamment des CSS. Jugez vous-m�me avec le test Acid2 tel qu'il est pass� par l'actuelle version 7 d'Internet...
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Great news , but .. Question for IE8 devels : will SVG support be in milestones ? Its on of 'big changes' in upcomming opera's an firefox's releases. Its not a secret that IE has been one which have to chase other browsers. And this yould be one more step for web development techs.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Fine. Now try this on for size. When IE 8.0 finally ships and we find that if and only if it finally adheres to web standards then the developers can stop catering to IE 6.0/7.0 altogether with bright shiny disclaimers on their websites that state; "In order to view this site you need to upgrade your browser to IE 8.0, Firefox 3.0 or Opera". Save yourself a boat load of troubles and start putting all your hard work into one set standard. Like it should have been 5 years ago. This is the 21st century for crying out loud. I love it.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Thats a good claimed, Cograts. any hint with Public beta release?
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
No more ridiculous hasLayout garbage!!!! http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Dec/0151.html Markus Mielke [MSFT] explains that it was never meant to be exposed. Now all we need is JS/DOM support to work in IE8, and we can ship it! IE6 Deprecation.. Here We Come!!!! Can't Wait!
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Why does the smiley face at the begining of this post look so bad? It has the horrible artifacting that JPEGs have, yet the file is a PNG! Please tell me that posters on this blog know that PNGs are the only way to go for screenshots on this blog, and that converting a JPEG to a PNG doesn't cut it. Or is this some FuzzyType(TM) induced issue? Otherwise, I'm with all the other commenters on this blog. Great news that IE has joined the Acid2 club (last member, but better than never), just wish there was some news about the only topic we care about. DOM Fixes JavaScript Fixes Can I prototype yet?, are all the DOM Events, Methods and Properties sorted out yet? Thanks.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
This is very exciting news! Nice work.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Congratulations guys!!! This news has made me really happy. Please don't let that stupid lawsuit from Opera discourage you. You guys have done a great thing for the future of the web. My opinion of Microsoft has just risen several hundred fold. Thank you for this very exciting news - I suspect you've made thousands of new friends! Congratulations again on what must have been a HUGE amount of work. Impressive stuff.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
ie will be standards compliant? say it aint so!
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
This is heartening news! With the furore this week about the Opera lawsuit, and doom sayers predicting the demise of the W3C, it is great to hear about some real progress being made in the area of web standards. This news will go a long way to convincing web designers/developers that Microsoft is on the right track with IE 8.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
pour voir l'effecacité de logiciel
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
That's a photoshopped image!! you can see a lil background at the back of "Hello world!" ;)
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
@Stifu: Yes they did. http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Microsoft_Responds_To_Opera_Lawsuit_11788.html
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
@Hank: Nope, they didn't. http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/microsoft-antitrust
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
L'information est tombée mardi 19 Décembre 2007 sur le Blog IEBLOG, la prochaine version du navigateur de Microsoft devrait passer le test Acid 2 Internet Explorer 8 respectueux des standards ? Si Microsoft est souvent critiqué (à tord ou à raison) son navigateur.... http://www.vdp-digital.com/articles/view.php/78/Internet-explorer-8-test-acid2
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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Anonymous
December 21, 2007
PEOPLE: STOP CATERING TO IE6. IT IS DEAD. LET'S MOVE ON. as for the Acid2 test, congrats :) I just tried it on my IE3.0 (Vista compatible version) and it totally failed, so I'm glad to see you guys are progressing. Here's to IE8 in 2032 (but hopefully sooner)!
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Now, please, PLEASE include this in automatic update of windows,, or wait, maybe is better to wait few, months, years, to see how is working,, haha...
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
I'm tearing up i'm so happy. Not even kidding. Thanks IE8 dev team.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007

Pls fix the Q and OBJECT elements.
Take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines
Please support proper XHTML 1.1.

Anonymous
December 21, 2007
automatic updates didn't make everyone adopt ie7 forcing us to continue to support ie6. for the ie8 rollout i'm expecting armed bill gates look alikes enforcing the upgrade. it's our only hope
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Dearest MS, I make a deep wish from the bottom of my heart to please make IE8 available also for Windows 2000, Me and 98SE. This will also entirely change people's opinion of Internet Explorer.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
This is amazing then when IE8 comes out in what 2020 -_-.
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
BRING BACK IE FOR THE MACINTOSH!
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
@anonymous: |object| is fixed in IE8 standards mode, else Acid2 would fail.
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
If i type a url, then switch the focus to other window. Later on i switch back to IE, the "Go" button would change to refresh button. It is a bug or a "design"?... many thx
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
shame it's going to take years to phase out the other browser versions you didn't bother to make standards compliant in the first place.. sigh. at least this is a start I guess.
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
Bringing back IE for the Mac would be a step backwards and a downgrade for the Mac. It is far better for Mac users to use Safari or Firefox or Opera than to wish for old, buggy non-standard IE8. Yes, I wrote that correctly. IE8 will still be 10 years behind web standards, or more, when it comes out due to its poor or non-support of other web standards, including the DOM, XHTML, Javascript, SVG, etc.
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
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Anonymous
December 22, 2007
Please listen to the people's requests on this blog.
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
What is really needed, given that Win2000 is in extended support until 2010, and some corporates will defer upgrading to Vista until then, is to make IE7 and IE8 available for Windows 2000. Otherwise we're stuck with another 3 years of hacking sites to be IE6-compatible.
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
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Anonymous
December 22, 2007
Software Development is moving in wrong direction. 'features' are dominating 'quality'. Not just one instance, many times IE7 crashes, started using firefox for those sites.(eg moneycontrol.com) still i am not convinced to use firefox for everything. because UI, fonts (esp local languages) looking good only in IE7. But that itself not sufficient. functionality is more importantant than UI. when people started making quick money and forgot honesty, software dev also goes in that direction only. there is no surprise
Anonymous
December 22, 2007
if only ie was developed to follow standards, we won't be rejoicing on such minor annoucements like this (minor bec. other browsers and not the leading in terms of number of users have passed this in their final releases already even b4 ie could). This is not to say that what you have announced is insignificant, but to say that it is only significant bec. ie is not known to really follow the standards.... Flame me, but truth hurts... I just hope that within the future (starting today) MS and IE Team will strictly follow the standards first before anything else... Help make our lives as web apps developer easier by making the practice of supporting different behaviours on different browsers a forgotten virtue... now, that would be good :-)
Anonymous
December 23, 2007
It looks like you have granted my first (and most critical) wish for IE8, and I'm so happy to hear it. I certainly hope this test is passed as a result of standards compliance, and not just gearing your renderer towards showing the right thing to benchmarks.
Anonymous
December 23, 2007
I thought I wouldn't live to see this day or probably would be telling this news to my grandchildren.
Anonymous
December 23, 2007
This is a good sign, look forward to seeing the finished product. Keep up the flow of information and discussion. Obviously you can never make everyone happy but please keep trying!
Anonymous
December 23, 2007
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Anonymous
December 23, 2007
Internet decides to reject all IE8 and cancelled for Windows XP.
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
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Anonymous
December 24, 2007
#2 public bug tracking #3 public bug tracking #4 DOM compliance #5 JavaScript improvements #6 IE7 UI Overhaul #7 UI Overhaul of any UI element from IE6 or earlier that has not been updated #8 JavaScript Console #9 JavaScript Console #10 CSS2 100% #11 XHTML 100% #12 SVG #13 Favorites Overhaul - 504 chars is NOT enough! #14 Speed improvements - loading a blank tab should take milliseconds #15 Ability to close single open tab! #16 Undo Close Tab #17 Did we mention public bug tracking yet?!
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
i think i find a bug in IE browser. it been found in IE6 and IE7,but i dont know it's still in ie8. code: <div> <iframe src="a.html"></iframe> <iframe src="b.html"></iframe> </div> if you press Ctrl+F5，IE can be send a right request: Get a.html... Get b.html... but,if you press F5, IE will send a wrong request and recived 304 of Http header,It will be request: Get a.html... Get a.html... if our code like as: <div> <iframe src="a.html"></iframe> </div> <div> <iframe src="b.html"></iframe> </div> It be work good in IE. by tonera@gmail.com
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
Congrats! Nice to see that, when it comes to the Browser Wars, you folks won't keep trying to bring knives to the gunfight.
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
if (document.URL == 'http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top') { document.write('<H2 ID=top>Hello World!</H2>'+ '<IMG SRC=http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.png>') }
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
Congrats! Took you long enough.
Anonymous
December 24, 2007
@James You had to buy a Mac to test Safari, come on, your a closet Mac lover, just admit it. Safari has been passing the Acid2 test for just about as long as it has been around. IE has always failed horribly, and ever Firefox doesn't get it right. Safari is quite compliant thank you very much. (Although I still use Firefox :p)
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
GREAT!!! It took quite enough time.
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
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Anonymous
December 25, 2007
"Safari has been passing the Acid2 test for just about as long as it has been around." - James ...and IE4 was released in September 1997 and unlike say, nightly builds of Safari, you can use your keyboard without a mouse to navigate. :-P
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
@John A. Bilicki III: yeah, I only just recently noticed that neither Safari or Opera let you do that... (Or not by default, at least)
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
Pitié .. gardez une compatibilité avec Freewop. Chaque mise a jours entraine une incompatibilité. The french is the winer
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
Freewop: that might be because your site is badly coded (100 HTML errors on your index...). IE8 is supposed to be more respectful of standards, so if you site respected standards, then you'd be safe (pretty much). PS: you meant "winner", not "winer"... Unless you meant "whiner" ? Anyway, that was stupid.
Anonymous
December 25, 2007
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Anonymous
December 26, 2007
@John A. Bilicki III: I never noticed Opera didn't implement focus until 9.5... On the other hand, I really can't agree with you about Opera's CSS(3) support. Opera (9.5) supports all of the CSS3 pseudo-selectors, opacity, text-shadow, multiple-backgrounds... IMO, the main things it lacks compared to competitors are border-radius and rgba. (While on the other hand, Firefox lacks text-shadow and multiple backgrounds) So yeah, it seems like Webkit takes the lead when it comes to CSS3. IE doesn't even support opacity, you have to use that filter proprietary code instead. There's just no contest between IE and Opera, they're not on the same level.
Anonymous
December 26, 2007
I am looking forward to the release of IE8. Here is hoping that Microsoft includes XSLT 2.0 in its next browser.
Anonymous
December 26, 2007
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Anonymous
December 26, 2007
@John A. Bilicki III: sorry, I was wrong. Opera doesn't support "regular" multiple backgrounds yet. (Test page: http://stoneship.org/pub/multiplebackgrounds/) I got mixed up with a similar test, which was about multiple backgrounds using SVG, which only Opera 9.5 passes (http://files.myopera.com/Fyrd/mb/svgmultiple.html).
Anonymous
December 26, 2007
better late than never. ..oh wait, IE's losing the war. move along people, nothing to see here.
Anonymous
December 27, 2007
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Anonymous
December 27, 2007
Please support DOM properly....don't simply focus on CSS.
Anonymous
December 27, 2007
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Anonymous
December 27, 2007
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Anonymous
December 27, 2007
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Anonymous
December 28, 2007
@System.Reflection.Emit: Of course not. ACID2 was passed long before the WSP central test server was misconfigured, and we maintain an internal copy of the test anyway.
Anonymous
December 28, 2007
@EricLaw Is there a list of Windows applications that work(ed) with IE6, that no longer work with IE7? I presume that this is the only "real" reason why users/IT pros haven't updated from IE6 to IE7 (at least on XP) Thinking about this a little deeper.... not being able to lock in to a certain version of embedded IE, seems to be a flaw in the overall design. By auto-updating, you put huge pressure on software developers to ensure their apps work long after the browser has been upgraded, and at the same time, you hinder IE's progress, because you always have to cater to old applications that can't handle new features, or updates to the specs that break old IE behavior! A web site is real easy to fix/adjust... since the code isn't (typically) compiled... but a windows app may live long after the source code is nowhere to be found, or in a sad state. I really want IE8 to fix all of its issues, but it seems it must be done in a very special way if IE continues to bundle auto-updating controls in windows applications. The whole browser evolution thing seems very tied down to the underlying Operating System. If I was a windows application developer, I would be very weary of using IE as a web control in my apps based on the info you provided above!
Anonymous
December 28, 2007
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Anonymous
December 28, 2007
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Anonymous
December 28, 2007
I know it's a bit off-topic but this blog post has cooled so... Anyone know of a working Windows Messenger status script written in PHP? I have AIM, Yahoo, and even Skype working for my IM tab under contact on my site. I removed my MSN screen name since everyone kept using it as email instead of the email form.
Anonymous
December 29, 2007
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Anonymous
December 29, 2007
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Anonymous
December 29, 2007
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Anonymous
December 29, 2007
Today in IE the user has only 2 options....remember a password or don't remember it. While a remembered password can be deleted, if we click "NO", then IE does not prompt any more. The only way to get IE to prompt again FOR THAT SITE is to clear ALL passwords. IE team, pls fix this minor feature in IE8 so that like Firefox "Dont remember now" button is added.
Anonymous
December 29, 2007
Another feature regarding passwords which Firefox 3 implements is that now it logs in and checks whether the login was successful and only then it prompts to save the password. I guess these minor features can be easily implemented.
Anonymous
December 29, 2007

Please add the ability to close a tab without the need to make it active first.
Replace the UGLY mouse wheel scroll icon.
Save the window size, always maximize upon launching.
Firefox has an option to allow websites to disable right click using Javascript. This does not require Javascript to be entirely disabled/toggled.
Please include a MIME file type association handler
In Internet Options=>Programs, add a "default Feed Reader" like Calendar, Contacts etc.
A full blown UI to manage passwords would be even better. It can be protected via a master password for security.

Anonymous
December 29, 2007
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Anonymous
December 29, 2007
Sorry, can't resist after I found out: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/23/ms-explorer-hits-iceberg-cassia
Anonymous
December 30, 2007
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Anonymous
December 30, 2007
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Anonymous
December 31, 2007
:) great! what about problems with innerHTML?
Anonymous
December 31, 2007
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Anonymous
December 31, 2007
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Anonymous
December 31, 2007
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Anonymous
December 31, 2007
finally, but in real world means nothing, ie 6 is still the most used browser, this is coming very late, i must used filters for at list 4-5 years more from now, maybe more.
Anonymous
January 01, 2008
if (url=='http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top') { render(ACID2_IMAGE, 0, 0); } else { render(PAGE); } :P jk.
Anonymous
January 01, 2008
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Anonymous
January 01, 2008
Yes but the middle click is not very convenient for mice that have a scroll wheel. Also, right clicking and selecting Close is a 2-step process. Why can't IE close tabs like Firefox can without making them active? This is not the solution to my issue.
Anonymous
January 01, 2008
@someone: maybe get a better mouse, because mine has a scroll wheel and yet makes middle clicking quite easy... :p And personally, I find it much more convenient to middle click tabs to close them... But yeah, with a bad mouse or on a laptop, it could still be nice to make things easier by mimicking the way Firefox does it... Or just not use IE. :)
Anonymous
January 01, 2008
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Anonymous
January 01, 2008
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Anonymous
January 01, 2008
@someone: I’ve had no problems middle‐clicking with a scroll wheel. It feels natural to me anyway. My first mouse with a wheel had a wheel that was cumbersome to use though so it could be your mouse. I have wonder how many tabs you keep open in Mozilla Firefox, by the way. I believe that the close buttons disappear on the inactive tabs when they get small enough. “Why can't IE close tabs like Firefox can without making them active? This is not the solution to my issue.” If my answer was not a solution, then you’re making the wrong request. I suspect that it should be something more like, “Internet Explorer should offer a tab closing mechanism for inactive tabs that requires no more than a non‐middle, single click (but should indeed require a click).” or, to be more specific, “Internet Explorer should offer a close button on each tab even if it’s active (and mimic Mozilla Firefox’s disappearing close button behavior when the tab is small in width?)”. (Presumably, you also find the, IMO, cumbersome keyboard method (press Tab until the active tab is focused, press the arrow keys until the relevant inactive tab is focused, press Enter to make it active, and press Ctrl+W) and the double‐click method (where you anticipate the location of the close button on the inactive tab) unacceptable too.)
Anonymous
January 02, 2008
I want to be able to close the first tab!!! It is frustrating that I have to open a new tab, to close the first tab in IE7. If I want to close down my Gmail, MSN, or whatever page, I shouldn't have to open a new tab to do it. I understand what MS was thinking they were doing.. "well, if you want to close down the last tab, just navigate somewhere else" is all very good, but users don't think like that, they want to do what they do everywhere else (including in other browsers)... middle-click... gone! Its a minor detail, but one of the many minor details that keeps me from using IE7 on a daily basis.
Anonymous
January 02, 2008
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Anonymous
January 02, 2008
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Anonymous
January 02, 2008
Two things that are really important:

HTML 5's doctype and any real (as in application/xhtml+xml) XHTML must trigger full standard compilant mode;
When many people are using this great new mode, remove the old engines part by part to make a smooth transition to standard compilant WWW ^_^

Anonymous
January 02, 2008
This is one thing that gets to me that Mitch 74 reminded me of. The whole thing where IE will render whatever it feels like as HTML even when explicitly told it's text, this breaks so many sites, and the fact that IE will render something saved as .txt then render as .html breaks even more. For a group intent on "not breaking the net" you're sure doing an obscene amount of damage to it. Heck, it's a security flaw at some levels since unscrupulous people can just find some easy IE flaw and then exploit it and save the site as .txt, enough users of other browsers see this enough that they'd take a moment to think about if the site is worth seeing, then fire up IE and get owned by something that never could've affected them if IE just handled text right. I'll even bet that the trade off of people who wind up needing IE to view .txt sites who wouldn't normally use IE is probably about equal to the people who like IE and have to use other browsers just to see the embedded text in xyz site. And don't any of you dare to claim standards compliance till this is fixed, since actually handling mime types and doing what the developer tells IE to do is kind of important to being compliant. Yeah, you got ACID2 down, congrats. Unfortunately it's pretty small when compared with the whole list of things to fix in IE, and all the silence isn't helping. Daily updates would be appreciated, just have some team member take 5-10 mins at the end of the day to blog about what they got done and a lot of us will be a bit happier. You said there'd be more info about IE8 so lets see it all, cause one post really doesn't count.
Anonymous
January 02, 2008
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Anonymous
January 03, 2008
Ou comment palier à l'une des plus vicieuses déficiences mentales du navigateur le plus pourri de la planète sans renoncer à un élément HTML très pratique. [MÀJ] : il semblerait que le comprtement de MSIE soit encore plus pernicieux que ça.
Anonymous
January 08, 2008
I came to the blog looking to vent some IE spleen. But this is good news. All we need to know now is when is IE8 going to be released? The sooner I don't have to support IE6 the better. there's nothing new below, but I would like to see:

updates with the same regularity as FF
opening up plug in development like FF (those open src tools are the best developers tools available) - or at least pay someone to build them properly and keep improving them - IE toolbar is not there yet!
a review of your configuration dialogues - they are a nightmare Sadly for MS (or perhaps luckily, if you're that way inclined) - just copy your competitors!

Anonymous
January 08, 2008
nice but problems innerHTML?
Anonymous
January 09, 2008
IE8 passed the Acid2 test!! What's next then...
Anonymous
January 09, 2008
"I also expect backwards compatibility." That's a rather nice sentence. I'm not sure whether vista follow this?
Anonymous
January 09, 2008
Well done. Hope that IE8 will have automatic updates, so you can make sure people are using the latest browser.
Anonymous
January 09, 2008
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Anonymous
January 10, 2008
i browse onfy with the firefox!
Anonymous
January 11, 2008
Will it have support for CSS3 ?
Anonymous
January 11, 2008
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Anonymous
January 16, 2008
Last night, Ron presented to the Memphis .NET Users Group .  The talk began with the improved administrative
Anonymous
January 16, 2008
C'est la nouvelle du jour: la version (interne) de d�veloppement principale d'Internet Explorer 8 passe le test Acid2. Dean Hachamovitch de Microsoft <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer...
Anonymous
January 16, 2008
I just ran across something from December that is of major significance to web developers WW. The Internet
Anonymous
January 21, 2008
In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to
Anonymous
January 21, 2008
In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to
Anonymous
January 21, 2008
In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to
Anonymous
January 23, 2008
A couple of months a IE rendering dilemma: How to fix IE8's rendering engine without breaking all the corporate intranets out there? How to create both a standards oriented browser and still ensure that the main customers of Microsoft - the enterprises
Anonymous
January 23, 2008
"Porque se visualiza diferente en IE7, que en IE6? Como será el IE8?"... son variadas
Anonymous
February 10, 2008
Back in 2006 support for many of the more advanced selectors were still very limited. Most browsers did not support the new selectors introduced by CSS level 3 at all and even support for the selectors...
Anonymous
February 21, 2008
As Dean announced , a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the first half of 2008.
Anonymous
February 21, 2008
As Dean announced , a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the first half of 2008
Anonymous
February 22, 2008
Acid2 をうけて 2008 内のマイルストーン展開を見込んでいる IE 8。個人的にも 2008 年の最大関心事と位置づけて期待していますがプロダクトマネ...
Anonymous
February 25, 2008
There is speculation among some of the technology watch groups that the first beta for IE 8 may be released
Anonymous
February 25, 2008
There is speculation among some of the technology watch groups that the first beta for IE 8 may be released
Anonymous
February 25, 2008
Com'era stato promesso lo scorso dicembre, entro la fine di questo trimestre Microsoft prevede di rilasciare al pubblico la prima versione beta di Internet Explorer 8. A confermare questa tabella di marcia è una email, inviata da Microsoft ad u
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Just to let you guys know… Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the IE team, just announced that IE8
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test , some of you may be seeing results like the image
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test , some of you may be seeing results like the image
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
This is what Phil Nachreiner, Internet Explorer Developer has posted on the Official IE blog: Although
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
C'est la petite surprise du jour, Microsoft vient en effet d'annoncer aujourd'hui qu'Internet Explorer 8 adoptera le mode de rendu standard par défaut. En effet, on savait déjà que la prochaine version du navigateur de Redmond possèderait 2 moteurs
Anonymous
March 26, 2008
Sasvim slučajno (a možda i ne) uskoro će nam se uporedo pojaviti dve nove verzije dva najpopularinija
Anonymous
April 14, 2008
De forma algo inesperada Microsoft ha puesto a disposición (¡desde ya!) una beta1 de su navegador Internet Explorer en su octava versión, el browser que debería competir con Firefox versión 3 para el reinado de la navegación por la WWW.Como es
Anonymous
June 07, 2008
IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Anonymous
June 19, 2008
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Anonymous
June 24, 2008
This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The topic is complicated
Anonymous
July 28, 2008
If you did not know Microsoft is currently working on Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), you may ask why a new
Anonymous
August 23, 2008
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Anonymous
October 23, 2008
Mozilla, Firefox 3 ile bomba gibi geliyorum diye dursun... Internet Explorer 8, Acid2 testini bile geçiyorum desin... Windows ortamında bir rakip, sessizce kalpleri feth etmeye başlıyor. Kim mi? Safari! Çoğu kişinin tepkisini tahmin edebiliyorum. Taht
Anonymous
January 15, 2009
I focused on the things I enjoyed and looked for business opportunities that had a fit with my interests. It was at this stage I came across Network Marketing or MLM. My initial reaction was that of probably everyone’ s (another scam to take my hard earned),

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