It seems the Internet Explorer development team is finally stepping up, and the upcoming version 8 of their browser will at last respect web standards. Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE development team, announced today on IEblog that IE8 passes the Acid2 test, joining other browsers that already do — Safari (the first to pass it), Opera 9, Firefox 3, and others.
A rather well-timed announcement, incidentally, given that on 13 December Opera Software filed a complaint with the European Union partly for this very reason. Microsoft, for their part, claims that standards compliance had been a priority from the start of the project.
If you’re not a web developer, all this talk of the Acid2 test and web standards probably means nothing to you, so let me explain briefly. The test consists of a drawing constructed using HTML and CSS 2.0 standards — elements and features that every browser is supposed to support. If the browser actually respects those standards, it should display a smiley face; otherwise, you get results like these.
If this announcement holds true in the final release of IE8, it would mean the end of one of the biggest headaches web developers face on every project: getting Internet Explorer to display a webpage the way it’s supposed to.