IE8 – Trying to become a real browser?

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Design.

Microsoft posted an article on their Internet Explorer blog earlier this week where they claimed Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. Internet Explorer has been the cause of many web design headaches due to blatent disregard for Web Standards. Microsoft may finally be feeling pressure from Opera and Mozilla to comply with Web Standards.

We have a choice of browsers

Microsoft has been able to get away with poor standards due to their market dominance. A vast majority of web surfers are running on PC’s running Windows. Since Internet Explorer is the installed with Windows it is the browser of choice for many its users. They have loosely interpreted many of the W3C’s guidelines and even invented a few of their own (remember the ‘blink’ tag?).

Mozilla has been fighting an uphill battle against Microsoft with their Firefox web browser and Apple recently launched their popular Safari browser for the Windows operating system.

As this browser competition develops, web surfers are beginning to realize that they have a choice in browsers. They also recognize that Internet Explorer is not necessarily the best option for them. Fortunately, the competition seems to be driving browsers towards standards compliance.

Bangin’ the war drums

The browser war has been fierce lately and there is no sign of it ending. Meet the contenders:

• Internet Explorer;
• Opera;
• Firefox;
• and Safari.

While Opera is taking the legal route against Microsoft by filing an antitrust complaint with the European Union, Firefox is fighting with bare knuckles. Firefox is quickly gaining market share by offering a superior product and marketing virally, but it still has a long way to go. Safari is a favorite Macintosh browser, and let’s face it… will stay a Macintosh browser. I believe it has simply been ported to Windows for iPhone development reasons.

Why is Acid2 important?

The Acid2 test is published by WebStandards.org, a web standards advocacy coalition. It is certainly not a complete Web Standards compliance test, but it does highlight problems across the current available browsers. Assuming that Microsoft’s claim is true, it proves that they are beginning to feel pressure from their competition and are moving towards Web Standards compliance. Welcome to the war, Microsoft.

Conclusions

I believe our choice of browsers should be based on the features and personality of the software, not on its ability to render web pages. Ideally, all the browsers should be able to render web pages consistently leaving me, the consumer, to choose the browser implementation that is best for my working environment.

Admittedly, it is an optimistic goal, but one worth really going for.