IE8 Passes Acid2!

[TJ111]

http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-8-now-doesnt-trip-on-acid

Finally, it looks like IE8 will offer proper CSS support. Hopefully the launch of IE8 sometime next year will cause the majority of IE6 users at least to upgrade to IE7. Now to wait and see if they fix all their pesky DOM issues.

Also, on a sidenote, FF3 beta 2 is out for people using it in testing their sites.

[drhowarddrfine]

This was started in General.

Passing Acid2 means little. It means a browser "fails properly", that is, it handles invalid markup. It's become a marketing tool that only Opera found important enough to pass. It's always been known that any browser vendor could tweak their code to pass Acid2.

Passing Acid2 means IE8 will handle invalid markup properly but that is no assurance it will handle valid markup properly. We can't know how well it will do that until it comes out. But rest assured, Dean has already stated Microsoft determine "which standards they will support".(!)

What does that mean? He mentions W3C standards but includes other "unknowns"! Perhaps Microsoft "standards" that don't work anywhere else? I think the answer is "probably" and we'll go through more problems with IE as we always have.

Another interesting point. Nowhere did they state when IE8 would come out.

[TJ111]

They state in the video that they are focusing on making acid2 work natively the way it is supposed to, not just hack the browser to render it correctly. Also they mention a beta early next year, that's where I got the "next year" release from, as a browser shouldn't be in beta for more then a few months. Firefox 3 also passes acid2.

It's not so much the fact that it passes acid2, but the fact that they say they are focusing on making it work the way it is designed to work, ie. focusing on standards and better CSS support. I have little faith in MS and IE in general, but hey at least this gives us some hope.

Also, they will probably still support several old MS standards, but that's irrelevent to most of us who design with cross-browser standards in mind. Similare to how Firefox (and all Gecko browsers) support the -moz property.

[drhowarddrfine]

This comment from howtocreate.com:
Note, however, that Microsoft have said that they will require authors to opt-in to use the IE 8 standards mode. How they will do this remains unknown, but it is possible that the Acid 2 test will not qualify. This means that IE 8 may not actually pass the Acid 2 test unless it is changed to include the new trigger, whatever that may be. This would mean that it fails the test. Even if they add a special hack to allow the Acid 2 test to pass when hosted on its current server, that will also constitute a fail, since the idea is that the test will pass no matter where it is hosted. If the real test does not produce a pass when hosted on any server or stored locally, then this page will treat it as a fail.

[TJ111]

Ugh. Probably some more conditional comment crutches.

[Sunny G]

Sadly, it's true that passing the Acid test isn't much of a feat.
However, Microsoft is already working on IE8? It hasn't been their usual 5 (ish) year delay! Could it be possible that Microsoft is stepping up to the bar?
Or maybe they're just tired of us complaining ;)