The most current build of IE8 running in standards mode now correctly renders the Acid2 browser test.
Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards. Successfully rendering Acid2 is an important landmark for IE8, as it highlights the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards compatibility that we're committed to for this release. We are also announcing that IE8 Beta 1 will be released in the first half of 2008. This is the first significant disclosure of IE8 features and standards support and we expect broad interest. A Channel 9 video interview will provide further detail on this announcement.
As per usual, we will continue to collect designer and developer feedback to determine additional milestone timelines further down the line.
New information for developers: One of the goals of IE8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementation and without breaking the existing web. Last week, IE8 reached a core milestone: IE8 in standard mode now correctly renders the “Acid2 Browser Test”. Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards.
Browsers based on the current version of the Gecko layout engine, such as Firefox, Camino, and SeaMonkey, do not pass. However, Acid2 support is planned for Gecko 1.9, and so these browsers are expected to pass Acid2 once Gecko version 1.9 is finished. This includes Mozilla Firefox 3.0, which is currently in a beta release.So seen 1bit it is a no, although the current version of IE7 does a worse job than the current version of Firefox.
So is microsoft finally doing something that even mozilla cant do?Well... Not exactly. Firefox's beta) version 3 has passed the test for quite some time (http://ajaxian.com/archives/firefox-30-passes-acid-2-css-test), from what i understand. :)-Josh (December 20, 2007, 09:20 AM)
Give me one compelling reason to upgrade beyond IE6. One.
(Note that FF is my primary browser; the only time I see IE is during Windows update or Hotmail sessions.)-Ralf Maximus (December 20, 2007, 10:20 AM)
I think I'll stick with FireFox though, IE7 is so much slower than IE6 that it no longer has that advantage over FF.-f0dder (December 20, 2007, 09:46 AM)
Security, apart from a gazillion things more. IE7 comes with Windows, so even if you don't use it, I don't see why it should not be updated, just like any other Microsoft app.
Besides, Internet Explorer still gets launched by certain software or from certain parts of Windows (HTML Help), and you'll want to have the updated rendering engine around for software that uses it to show information from the Internet.
Good points, but as I said, the only time I use IE is when running Windows Update or checking my Hotmail account (rarely). Is security a big deal under those circumstances? 99.9% of my web access is through FireFox, which I *do* keep patched religiously.-Ralf Maximus (December 20, 2007, 11:52 AM)
Assuming the software respects my "default browser" setting, I usually get FireFox. Even from Microsoft Apps.
And I don't consider Windows Help particularly threatening malware wise. Should I?
Then Opera or my apps do not respect the setting all the time :(. At least, when I launch a link from a HTML Help file, I get IE7.-Lashiec (December 20, 2007, 01:02 PM)
Yes, speed. IE6 is much snappier than FireFox. It quite lost that advantage with IE7, while still being quite some way from the advantages of FF.I think I'll stick with FireFox though, IE7 is so much slower than IE6 that it no longer has that advantage over FF.-f0dder (December 20, 2007, 09:46 AM)
Did IE had any advantage over Firefox ever? (Well, maybe before 0.7 or 0.8 versions)-Lashiec (December 20, 2007, 10:51 AM)
Yes, speed. IE6 is much snappier than FireFox.-f0dder (December 20, 2007, 05:35 PM)
Ralf Maximus: (executable from disk) load/init speed, not render speed...-f0dder (December 21, 2007, 02:57 AM)
Ralf Maximus: (executable from disk) load/init speed, not render speed...-f0dder (December 21, 2007, 02:57 AM)
Ralf Maximus: (executable from disk) load/init speed, not render speed...-f0dder (December 21, 2007, 02:57 AM)
Ah, well thats a small distinction, since you load a lot of IE while loading windows and it sits in memory when not in use. I think I would rather that not be the case and pay a few extra seconds loading the browser when I use it, so to me the Firefox implementation is the advantage, not the IE6 one.-Tekzel (December 21, 2007, 09:55 AM)
The best idea in IE7 was hiding the Menu bar automatically, using the ALT key to display it. I rarely go to the menus, and this saves valuable screen space. I wish Opera would do this.-zridling (December 23, 2007, 03:49 PM)
I wish Opera would do this.
The best idea in IE7 was hiding the Menu bar automatically, using the ALT key to display it. I rarely go to the menus, and this saves valuable screen space. I wish Opera would do this.I kinda hate that feature, even though I don't use menus much. I think I could learn to live with it (perhaps even appreciate it) for my web browser, but overall? Dunno.-zridling (December 23, 2007, 03:49 PM)
Like what? What refuses to open your default browser?Anything using an embedded IE control + a few other apps. Some apps (including firefox and µTorrent) also specifically launch explorer.exe instead of whatever app is associcated with HKLM\Folder and HKLM\Directory... weird, since that actually requires more code than the simple ShellExecute...-Josh (December 24, 2007, 08:19 AM)
And that is the fault of IE how? That is the developer of said applications fault, not IEWell, with the "uses IE instead of system default browser", it's the fault of IE... but it would have been the same with any other browser component, after all when you click a link IE, you don't expect it to open in firefox, even if you select "open in new browser window".-Josh (December 25, 2007, 08:56 AM)
I don't think anyone pointed their finger at IE, more like the people behind IE - esp. when the tools that are hard-coded to use it instead of the default browser are made by the same corporation.I have x2 associated to both "Folder" and "Directory", but still firefox and µTorrent choose explorer.exe...
f0dder, I managed to make a few apps that always loaded explorer.exe load X2 by modifying the association for the folder shell context 'Open' key.-nosh (December 25, 2007, 09:29 AM)
I assume you're talking about creating your custom X2 key (eg: Open_X2) under 'Folder' & 'Directory' and then making that key the default action, like it says in the manual. I was talking about modifying the 'Open' key itself to point to X2 instead of Explorer. I don't have the setting on right now coz I restored a previous Windows image so can't confirm WRT ut & ff.-nosh (December 25, 2007, 09:59 AM)
If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves. It might actually be quite an effective way of dramatically increasing the costs of entering or competing in the browser market. (This is what we call "anti-competitive", or "evil".)
Big sites will become locked in to particular IE version numbers, unable to upgrade their content for fear of it breaking. Imagine in 18 years — only twice the current lifetime of the Web! — designers will not have to learn just HTML, they'll have to learn 4, 5, maybe 10 different versions of HTML, DOM, CSS, and JS, just to be able to maintain the various different pages that people have written, as they move from job to job.http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1201080691&count=1
Browsers will have to support an unmanageable and confusing mess of different rendering modes (and the PocketIE team will hate you for the bloat).http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/show.dml/1688321
Because the META tag affects every part of the page, progressively enhancing such pages with new CSS features will be harder.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">;-) http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/01/post_2.html
So, in conclusion, we don’t see a great need to implement version targeting in Safari. We think maintaining multiple versions of the engine would have many downsides for us and little upside.http://webkit.org/blog/155/versioning-compatibility-and-standards/
It will be interesting to see whether IE8 really supports Acid2, since that test page doesn't include any of the special magic words being proposed here. Will they hard-code the URI? Will they check every page against a fingerprint and if it matches the fingerprint of the Acid2 page, trigger the IE8 quirks mode instead of the IE7 quirks mode?
Note: Some 827 people (rough estimate, contents may have settled during shipping) have written to point out that the CSS used in the test is invalid. This is deliberate, as a means of exposing the ability of user agents to handle invalid CSS properly.-http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/
Like what? What refuses to open your default browser?Anything using an embedded IE control + a few other apps. Some apps (including firefox and µTorrent) also specifically launch explorer.exe instead of whatever app is associcated with HKLM\Folder and HKLM\Directory... weird, since that actually requires more code than the simple ShellExecute...-Josh (December 24, 2007, 08:19 AM)-f0dder (December 25, 2007, 08:21 AM)
Should have no effect since the object is inline (’height’/'width’ don’t apply to inlines).seems to indicate that problems in handling these statements would expose rendering problems that affects the valid css. That would be essential to test against. Invalid CSS in this context does not mean custom elements but using them in the wrong context which can happen easily if you have a website of a couple hundred pages served by one css file.
I was under the impression that the invalid code wasn't to be ignored and was to be 'fixed' by the browser to render a particular way so that less pages will break when a designer is careless and makes mistakes.-app103 (January 24, 2008, 05:50 AM)
Immortal Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 will be a permanent fixture on the web. [...]
When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. Whatever happens in Microsoft's browser life-cycle, Internet Explorer 7 will still be the default browser on a Microsoft Operating System.
[...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it's dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.
Either way, web standards compliant web developers are no better off with this proposal. Which leaves us absolutely no reason to accept the proposal.
The only way I see to move web standards forward is to reject this meta tag proposal (and any proposal that compromises browser agnostic authoring), and then set a deadline for browsers to fully support web standards. On the passing of that deadline, no compensation should be made for browsers. They live and die based on their support of web standards.-http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/CostOfMicrosoftsMetaTagProposal
What are Microsoft's real objectives here? I ask, because to me they are suspect. Wilson argues that the new "http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'" switch is a necessary compromise to ensure backwards compatibility while allowing Microsoft's browser to better adhere to Web standards. But the approach really requires adherence to an IE standard that benefits Microsoft's dominant Web browser.http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/web_services_browser/fliipping_the_ie8_kill_switch.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535
I would like to see Microsoft educating Web designers and developers about writing to standards supporting any browsing engine. I find it ironic that by default Microsoft's Expression Web creates standards-based Web pages that IE 7 might gag on.
I ask: Is the IE 8 switch a competing browser kill switch?
Sure...but will it support animated PNGw (.apng)? FireFox 3 & Opera 9.5 already do. XnView seems to support it also.-Nighted (December 19, 2007, 05:51 PM)
IE9 now scores 95/100 on Acid3, better than firefox 3.6.-Josh (September 19, 2010, 09:45 AM)