Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Article
03/03/2008

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

Why Change?

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

The rest of this blog post provides context around the different modes, the technical challenge, and what it means going forward.

Modes

Clear terminology around the different modes in IE8 (as well as other browsers) is crucial for the discussion. Wikipedia, as usual, offers a good starting point. The article about “Quirks mode” describes how modern browsers (like IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) all have different modes for interpreting the content of a web page: Quirks and Standards. (The article also covers “Almost Standards;” let’s set that one aside for the purpose of this discussion.)

Basically, all the browsers have a “Quirks” mode, call it “Quirks mode", and use it to offer compatibility with pages that pre-date modern standards. All browsers have a “Standards” mode, call it “Standards mode,” and use it to offer a browser’s best implementation of web standards. Each version of each browser has its own Standards mode, because each version of each browser improves on its web standards support. There’s Safari 3’s Standards mode, Firefox 2’s Standards mode, IE6’s Standards mode, and IE7’s Standards mode, and they’re all different. We want to make IE8’s Standards mode much, much better than IE7’s Standards mode.

The Wikipedia article’s explanation of why browsers have modes to begin with is worth looking at closely in this context:

"...the large body of legacy documents which rely on the quirks of older browsers represents an obstacle for browser developers, who wish to improve their support for standardized HTML and CSS, but also wish to maintain backward compatibility with older, non-standardized pages.… To maintain compatibility with the greatest possible number of web pages, modern web browsers are generally developed with multiple rendering modes: in "standards mode" pages are rendered according to the HTML and CSS specifications, while in "quirks mode" attempts are made to emulate the behavior of older browsers."

We decided to keep IE7’s Standards mode available in IE8. Our thinking was that this facility would be helpful as the web moves gradually from the large quantity of legacy content authored around IE7’s behaviors to a new era of much more interoperable and web standards compliant browsers. We based the decision to have an additional mode in IE8 on our experience with feedback from IE7. Specifically, during the transition from IE6 to IE7, many end-users found pages authored for the previous IE version’s Standards mode didn’t work well with the new version’s Standards mode.

The Technical Challenge

One issue we heard repeatedly during the IE7 beta concerned sites that looked fine in IE6 but looked bad in IE7. The reason was that the sites had worked around IE6 issues with content that – when viewed with IE7’s improved Standards mode – looked bad.

As we started work on IE8, we thought that the same thing would happen in the short term: when a site hands IE8 content and asks for Standards mode, that content would expect IE7’s Standards mode and not appear or function correctly.

In other words, the technical challenge here is how can IE determine whether a site’s content expects IE8’s Standards mode or IE7’s Standards mode? Given how many sites offer IE very different content today, which should IE8 default to?

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

Going Forward

Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web. Shorter term, leading up not just to IE8’s release but broader IE8 adoption, this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE. This topic is one of many things we’ll talk about with respect to IE8 at MIX this week.

Thanks,

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager
Internet Explorer

P.S. For further information on today's announcement, please go to the news release on our PressPass site.

Comments

Anonymous
March 03, 2008
That's great. When will you support alpha transparency in PNG?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks, on behalve of the forward-looking web :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you. Larry: you’re kidding, alpha transparency is supported since IE7.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Just now the IE team announced that it's reversing its policy on the default behaviour of IE8, which shows that it has been paying close attention to the discussion of its versioning proposal. I admit that I hadn't expected this reversal, but I welcome
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Oh, happy day. I appreciate that you not only listened, but reacted. Wonderful news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
IE8 will act like IE8, not IE7. We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Excellent news! Any chance IE8 will support application/xhtml+xml MIME type while we are at it?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
GREAT! Thanks, and thanks for listening.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
good decision. i suspect it was not an easy one for you, but it will help us all keep progressing forward. thanks.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hi, that is awesome news! I don't think I expected it to happen so I am very pleasantly surprised!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Two words: Thank you. Thank you for listening, thank you for giving the web a chance. Thanks for changing focus. I think this just made my day.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you for listening to the community on this one. I'm glad that I won't have to provide specific instructions to support standards in IE8.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
From Dean H. over on the IE Blog : One issue we heard repeatedly during the IE7 beta concerned sites
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I applaud you guys. Thank you for listening to the community... really. I feel more and more like there's a change in certain areas of Microsoft. Now we can have our customer support push IE users people to upgrade to IE8. (And not keep telling people to install Firefox)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
It feels like sunshine shining down. Thanks for listening.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you! Glad to see a new side of Microsoft listening to the community. Standards are the future.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Much better choice. This is exactally how I would expect it to work. And was wondering why all the pandering. The standards mode should always be the default. Previous rendering modes/engines should have to be specified by the html in some way. Bravo!!! BOb
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
So IE8 will deliberately break certain Web pages in an attempt to ward off legal liability. This is unfortunate, but probably the best that could be expected given the current legal climate. What I don't understand is why some people think this is somehow "better."
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I am incredibly happy to see Microsoft actually taking a sane approach to supporting standards, and listening to developers feedback. It seems like Microsoft hasn't given me much to praise in a while, and I hope this is a beginning to a new trend.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow! Thankyou thankyou thankyou!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I just want to add my voice to the chorus of thanks: thank you for listening to the community.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Good to hear, I liked IE8 before and I like it even better now.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
It just shows that Microsoft is a huge company regardless of certain evidence to the contrary, there are a large number of developers working there who are as dedicated to the greater-good of technology as anyone. I've always felt the IE team's goals were in the right place and I'm more than happy to be justified in that belief. Now if we can just get webdav support back in IE... (there's always an if, isn't there?).
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for doing the right thing. :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
From the bottom of my heart: "THANK YOU". THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Bravo! I applaud your eagerness to learn, grow, and adapt. IE is now becoming no longer an enemy/annoyance to designers but a welcome addition to the choices in web browsers.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I am genuinely surprised by this announcement, this is fantastic news. Thanks.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for listening. I hope you can also get away with not freezing rendering engine versions at all in the future, so that content="IE=8" will be exactly the same as content="IE=9" and so forth, and that there will really be just one version of the web. But I guess that will be mostly up to us web devs. I hope we'll be up to the task.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I have to say kudos to the IE Team for listening to the web community. I'm not an IE user, but I still care about IE's development, since the majority of the world uses it.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you very much. Looks like, now, that you [IE team] can stash away those Groucho Marx eyeglass disguises as you walk out into the campus parking lot.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I LIKE that answer, Dean. I like it a lot.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great news! Thanks for making this very important change!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
this is good to hear, it will make for a happier SxSw this weekend, and also as a standardista web developer I think any other tactics apart from this way is the correct way for the future of IE and your web browser share
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hey, that is great. I have criticized IE before, but let me offer the team my praise for doing the right thing here.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great! You really are listening, then. That's a good sign. Keep up the good work and let's get rid of IE6 together. IE8 sound great so far.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you oh so much. I'm still going to leave that silly IE=edge flag active on the servers and applications under my control for a little while longer, but really, excellent news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
How about cats+dogs MIME support plz.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great to hear about your standards approach! Looking forward to users having browser choice without developer pain.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Seriously, thank you. I hope this is the result of someone at MS actually starting to care, and that this is not just a PR stunt to shout "MS cares about standards!", or to avoid more lawsuits. I think you still have a little ways to go to prove to me that this is the first step towards many great changes, but this is a giant leap of a first step. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is great news! Thanks! Now, I'm going to continue to cross my fingers and wait for MIX08 news on the IE8 standards support...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
That's good news. Credit where it's due - well done, IE folks.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Only fools don't change their mind. I'm glad you did. Thanks.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I second and third the comments stating that this is a positive move for Microsoft, the Web and caffeine-addicted Web Developers. Maybe you should post one of those monkey dance videos of Steve Ballmer shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Go on, let's celebrate good times!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hey Now IE8, I along with everyone sure is looking forward to this browser. Thx 4 the info, Catto
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Many of us are behind you 100%
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you! This blog post has single-handedly restored my faith in Microsoft. :) It's one thing to publish a set of interoperability principles, and it's quite another to put your money where your mouth is and actually follow them even when that decision may mean some short-term pain. Kudos.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you Microsofttttttttttttttttttttttttt! Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! keep up the good work!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Brilliant! Thanks for listening - this is excellent news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Now we need a faster pos-developing and bug fixing,perhaps this is the beginning of a more active IE Team?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I can't wait to gouge my eyes while correcting a whole new set of flaws in yet another IE. Thanks Microsoft & the IE team!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I preferred the previous way of handling this - this is a case of either favouring customers or developers. With this new change, customers lose out since there is a lot more broken on the web, developers lose since they have to pay more money to make sure sites work with IE8. Browser competitors win since IE takes another compatibility hit. And just remember there are far more customers than developers out there. Does MS ever think that the OSS advocates are driving these kind of changes so that MS loses ground? Just look at the negative press on vista, and its a terrific OS. Look at OOXML and the negative press surrounding that, I sure hope that MS doesn't give more into what really is a false perception.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you IE team, you have just earned yourselves a great deal of respect from the standards community, you have made the right decision and commend you. This certainly beats my previous position wherein I was preparing to drop support for IE completely. Thank you for listening to the community. Respect.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
As one of the critics of the former decision, a big thank you! Hopefully you'll continue to listen to feedback.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks! I understand this must have been a tough decision. I can't even imagine what problems that this will cause to all the existing websites and what a big testing effort it will create for the web developers. However this is less messy and the best way to get things set straight again. It will be a tough transition that might cause even more people to move away from IE, but we really need this done sooner rather than later. A few years down the road we will all gain from it.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is excellent news! A seemingly rare example of Microsoft doing The Right Thing - hopefully the start of a trend :) You've really made my day - thanks for listening!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is great news! I fully support this change of default behavior to encourage better interoperability. I think it is a very good idea to default to latest standards, otherwise IE11 will still be defaulting to IE7 mode for compatibility. Pages can still explicitly ask for IE7 compatibility if it is necessary. I am very glad to see that the IE team has responded to the developer communities concerns and changed its mind.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Excellent work Dean. congratulations to you and the IE8 team, you've made the right choice and made the lives of web developers around the world much easier!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I think this is the most praise I've ever seen on the IEBlog. Let's see if Slashdot is as forgiving...lol!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is a great start, but why not stop calling it "Super Standards" mode and stop requiring extra steps in our code to use it? This is easy: STANDARDS MODE = Web Standards Compliant QUIRKS MODE = NON Web Standards Compliant, meaning IE7, IE6, IE5, IE4, etc etc etc etc etc.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@GoodThings2Life I don't care if it's called Super Dooper Hyper Standards Mode II Turbo Edition, just as long as it's on by default.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I would like to better interoperate with MSIE and this change will make it easier to develop cross-platform much more simply sometime down the road. Thanks for reversing the original decision. /s.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Here's a new Interoperability Principle for you: make the thing capable of being installed standalone. Don't integrate it into the browser like some sort of spinal cord. You'll still be able to let your big-buck company friends like Adobe call the browser through some library. You don't have to make IE8 an integral part of Windows to have it usable in other programs.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
No, seriously, when are you going to support alpha on PNG files? Every time I try it, it almost works, but then it doesn't. For example, it doesn't print correctly. What I expect is something that looks like the screen. What I get is an opaque blob.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
or maybe just <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//Microsoft//Fan//Boy" "http://www.microsoft.com/fanboy.dtd">
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Way to just start catching up with everybody else as of last year, guys!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"I am incredibly happy to see Microsoft actually taking a sane approach to supporting standards, and listening to developers feedback." You're assuming their IE8 standards mode will work.....but that's a big assumption.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you. This might finally let us all slowly dig out of the morass of the past. True, there is going to be some short term pain, but we aren't talking a make or break proposition here. Older pages will still load, even if they look a little funny - but chances are if they have enough viewers to matter, they will be fixed sooner than later. If they are never fixed, chances are that if the author does not care, neither will the viewers (if any exist- the web is partly a huge dead letter office) Thank for again. In the long run, it is the right choice.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Welcome to the 21st Century, this will save my clients money and speed up website creation. Of course I will not be celebrating until it is actually delivered.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Another step forward. Well done.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Standards by default will increase the proportion of future documents written to standards (instead of IE quirks/proprietary). This is indeed good news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Dean, and all involved - thanks for listening. This is a great move for standards.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Dean, and all involved - thanks for listening. This is a great move for standards and ultimately IE.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'm glad to see that the final decision is the right decision. I'm not sure that I buy that it was legality issues (the Opera lawsuit?) and not the universal condemnation of web developers for the previous decision but whatever... It is still the right decision.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you, thank you, thank you!! As someone who makes a living doing web design, I have been waiting for this day for years. I will finally be able to code without having to come up with 800 different workarounds to make things look correct in IE. I'm extremely pleased and surprised that you guys actually listened and reversed a major decision like this. This is the right thing to do. Some sites will break in the short term, but in the long term, this is the right decision. And besides, if someone has a huge site coded around IE7, and they don't have the time or money to convert it to real standards, they can just use the meta tag to trigger IE7 rendering. Problem solved. Thank you again!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks -- that seems to be the right thing to do.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'm very glad to hear this! Among other things, this means that progressive enhancement will actually work with IE8.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you for throwing your weight in the right direction.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
The IE team never fails to impress and amaze me. I had great faith that you would make this decision! Way to go, IE Team! You have once again made one young software developer very happy!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You guys should have held off on this announcement for another week. Then I could feel like it was a birthday present. :) The previous announcement that there even was going to be an IE8 felt like a Christmas present. Keep the meta/http header as an option, just keep the default to what you say here. I was originally leaning towards your old default being the superior mode, but then it was pointed out that it was intranets that needed it the most and they're the ones that can use the HTTP headers the easiest.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is HUGE. Thank you so much! I have been avoiding Microsoft technologies in my web work for many years (on principle, not raw technological potential), and this goes a very long way towards growing trust.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I've said some time ago that I personally would have preferred if IE8 was in standard mode by default
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you for getting some sense about all of this. Now, make IE8 something we can all be proud of.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@GoodThings2Life: I don't think anybody at Microsoft has ever used the term "super standards" mode in the first place. They mentioned IE8 standards, IE7 standards or IE7 strict, and Quirks.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
It's also good for microsoft, at least in long term. If ie8 will be vista-only, and if most web sites will be standards-compliant, people will have one more reason to upgrade to vista. (If they don't just stay at xp and switch ie to firefox/opera, that is :) ) Still, gratulations, that was The Right Thing (tm).
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow, that's wonderful news. Thanks so much IE Team! It's exciting to see people thinking about the web, and while I can see the logic for the previous method (IE 8 behaving like IE 7 unless specified), this is far more standards-centric!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@sonicdoommario Yes, that's exactly what it means.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'll believe it when I see it.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Haven't read all the comments, so don't know if anyone else brought this up, but strictly as stated here I have to disagree with a lot of the comments. This isn't, yet, "the right thing." You've swung the pendulum from pro-user, anti-developer to anti-user, pro-developer. That decision isn't better, it's just a different evil. Give the user some control. Allow a global setting to choose which mode is the default, then default that setting to standards mode. In addition, give the user some way to override this global setting on a page and/or site level. The meta flag provided by a page should always override both of these. This is the only way you can be both pro-standards and not "break the web".
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I know this might sound a little embarrassing, but some people here have complained about breaking old sites. Personally, I like to think any sites that supported IE7 are already written by people smart enough to take IE8 into account - but perhaps IE8 could take the route of Safari and Opera and use a different User Agent string. Instead of MSIE use "Microsoft Internet Explorer" and include the string "like Gecko" Waddaya think?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You knew it was the right thing to do... KUDOS to the IE8 team, the web will be a better place. Now you really need to do some insane evangelism to make sure everyone can expect this!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
congrats on making a great decision! I get more and more excited about IE every version! keep up the great work!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
oh. and as well as the UA tweak, don't match the generic IE condcom when in standards mode.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"Give the user some control. Allow a global setting to choose which mode is the default, then default that setting to standards mode." Knowing Microsoft, there's probably already a registry setting indicating whether to default to standards mode or not. "In addition, give the user some way to override this global setting on a page and/or site level. The meta flag provided by a page should always override both of these. This is the only way you can be both pro-standards and not "break the web"." Agreed. :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hello all, I'm very happy Microsoft and its IE dev. team made this decision... a rather unexpected decision too. Thank you for listening and understanding. Best regards, Gérard Talbot
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Bravo! I was one of the man web designers who had some issues with the previously announced approach, and I think this is truly the right decision. Thanks for being so open to feedback from the community, and I look forward to the beta of IE8.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I truly never thought I'd see the day that the original proposal would be reversed, but here it is and I applaud whole-heartedly. Thank you so very much for listening and responding to the criticism so many of us had for the plan as proposed. Switching the default changes X-UA-Compatible from an imposition to a safety net, which is a fantastic move.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
So, what exactly happens to IE7's "quirks mode"?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
wonderful news, thank you IE team!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
这是否意味着很多在IE7下浏览正常的页面，在IE8下会出问题呢？ It's mean many pages looked fine in IE7,will looked bad in IE8?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
thank you for adhering to standards. there are some things you can take your own path on... rendering HTML and CSS should not be one of them :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you for this decision. All is right in the IT world, once again.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you very much :) This is definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft and will hopefully bring Internet Explorer near to the standard of other browsers.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@Rob: Get a clue. Netscape and Microsoft and bit players all "created quirks" as they rushed to add functionality during the so-called "Browser wars." Blaming Quirks on Microsoft is absurd.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@Rob, We could be mature here. It looks like they are trying to get back on track; the least we can do is applaud any positive steps they make.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank goodness. It probably won't be nearly as big a problem as it was with IE6->7 because IE6's so-called "standards" mode was a total joke, whereas IE7 is a lot better-that is, as far as it would affect most sites I would guess the difference between IE6 and 7 in standards mode is a lot greater than that between 7 and 8.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is music to my ears! I have recently been doing some development for Safari 3.0 (which already supports most of what we'll see in IE8), and I can tell you it's going to be fun to be a web developer. I am anxiously awaiting more details about exactly which standards will be supported. I'm sure this is still a work in progress, but if you can keep blogging about features whenever you can, I for one will be grateful. Thanks for much for listening!!!!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks. I and many other web developers really appreciate this. There have been some really positive things coming out of Microsoft, some of them resulting from feedback on this blog, improved standards conformance and this (to name 2). Keep up the good work.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
On behalf of all web developers everywhere; thank you. IE8 represents a massive turning point in the level of standards compliance on the web, and now every Internet user will be able to reap the benefits of the standards compliant web. Thank you so, so much for listening to us on this; it bodes amazingly well for IE going forward.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
With software used by as many people as IE, there are no easy decisions and possibly no "right" decisions but I think this is the best decision. Thank you.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I really wish that you could just come out and say that you're not doing something because nobody likes it. Regardless, though, thank you very much for finally helping to fix the Web. Now about DOM, SVG, MathML...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
AWESOME! When I read about the way IE8 would choose between its rendering modes, I was quite disappointed. I definitely didn't expect you to revert that decision. But you have, and I'm REALLY glad about that. You're doing the right thing, now. Kudos! Let's hope IE8 will be a much bigger improvement over its predecessor than IE7 already was. Let's also hope one of the lesser-compatible modes (probably "v7 compatibility mode") will be removed in the years to come. (On a sidenote, I'm still hoping you'll fix this rather severe bug, preferably for both IE7 and IE8: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ierace/ )
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you so much! This is definately the way to go.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Well, thank you! That great new for any Web Developper. If Standard mode is as good as you say it is, IE8 is gonna be a good one. Any plan for xhtml+xml? Not very important, but still ^^.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is a good day for the internet.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
THANK YOU Microsoft. On behalf of Web Application Developers everywhere...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'm amazed and impressed. Thank you for doing the right thing.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
As a web application developer committed to web standards, I'd like to join and add a thank you to Microsoft for this move. It's nice to know that MS listens to all those of us who asked for this, and I'm sure a lot of effort was spent on convincing the higher ups that this was the right thing to do. Well done!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
wow, was it the legal action raised by opera? or the ones you've lost in the UE council? I would cheer the move, if only it had been done for the right reasons (listening to developers worldwide instead of huh, lawyers). And tbh, i'm really suspicious of IE8. IE7 was going to be all about standards as well, and in the end... well, it wasn't. I'll believe it when I see it :) oh and don't take me wrong, if there's one thing that would ease the pain out of my job, that thing would be a functional, standards compliant, reliable browser from microsoft. suprise me please. J
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Just wanted to say one thing. Almost every site I've seen (both internal intranet and internet) are either IE6 only (even break with IE7), or work with everything. I really think you're overestimating the amount of sites designed to work with IE7 explicitly. In other words, I agree with this new decision, and I look forward to IE8!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great news! I'm not normally a fan of Microsoft technology but this is a positive move for everyone.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Congrats IE Team. You've (somewhat) redeemed yourselves.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hooray! Yippeee! Thank you thank you thank you! This is the greatest news I've heard in years, literally. I can't count the number of hours I've spent hacking CSS up to get things to look right in IE. It's great to know that in a couple of years time, that may all just be bad memories. Thanks again!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I might of said a few things over the years, and you might have said a few things indirectly back with your posts. But if you are really really really going to be doing this. I will say thank you.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
All I have to say is.... its about time.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Ok. Thanks Microsoft for a browser that will do the....best....it....can....with web standards. How "best it can" is that?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow! Thank you for listening, thinking, and deciding to go with principles. Web standards is the key to equal access to the web for all. That's one small meta for quirks, one giant leap for web standards!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
C’mon, for real? Wow :) I am scared of tomorrows news: ”Microsoft’s IEBlog got hacked” :D
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@Phil: "Netscape and Microsoft and bit players all "created quirks" as they rushed to add functionality during the so-called "Browser wars." Blaming Quirks on Microsoft is absurd." People don't blame Microsoft because they participated in the Browser Wars. People blame Microsoft because, once they "won", they sat on IE6 for FIVE YEARS without making fixes to its broken rendering engine. IE7 wouldn't have even been available on Windows XP if it weren't for Firefox. Microsoft were perfectly happy to irresponsibly sit on their laurels while millions of poorly-written web pages were designed for a browser and not for standards. As the cliche goes.. "with great power comes great responsibility". Microsoft acted irresponsibly with their market-leading position and it's why we are where we are today. I truly applaud this decision and think/hope it is a turning point not only for Microsoft as a company but for the web in general. Let's hope they follow through.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you so much. You have made my day!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
To everybody complaining about how this will break pages written for IE6/7, how hard is it? You can start adding the "render as IE7" meta tag to your stuff now, many months before IE8 even comes out as something more than a beta. This doesn't hurt users at all; at least, not for sites that have webmonkeys who know what they're doing. This change only has a negative impact on developers who are either too lazy or just plain incompetent. Supporting "backwards compatibility" for a broken system is not a good thing. Far better off causing some initial headaches, and then finding ourselves on greener grass on the other side. Once again, thanks MS.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Dean, thank you for this post, and thanks to you and the rest of the IE team for doing this the right way.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I will swear up and down when IE8 comes out and I need to support three versions of IE, two of Firefox, Safari, and maybe Opera. But! I will be terribly terribly happy in 2 or 3 years when IE9 comes out and I don't need to worry as much :-) Must have been tough to change your minds. Great job.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
bold move, and it only took you till 2008
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Finally, compliance for all the web developers who have been forced to write ridiculous code in order to get a page to view correctly in IE. The 800lb. Gorilla needed this.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Woah, awesome! This is great news! Thank you for listening to the community and choosing to do the right thing. I looks like Internet Explorer may be able to come out of the stone ages and become on par with other modern browsers, like Opera and those based on Gecko or Webkit. Internet Explorer 8 is looking very exciting now.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
As a budding web designer, I am so excited to hear about this. Today, the biggest barrier to innovative and exciting web design,is the incredible amount of negative energy and wasted time to produce a web site that will render on the most common browsers. As someone once put it: "the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from". Well, that is not so great if you are trying to create a good web site. Hopefully, this multiple standards mentality will soon be a thing of the past.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Microsoft, Let me add my voice to the long list: thank you for doing the right thing. In my mind this single announcement gives IE a reason to continue to exist. I am anxious to hear about more specific standard compliance. Again, thank you.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for listening (even if we did have to scream!) and for making the right decision.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you! This is great news indeed!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great Decision indeed !!!!!! Kudos to IE8 team to not just think but act differently from the past.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I am SO glad you guys finally saw the standards-compliant light! =)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Finally! Thanks to you guys, I'll be able to deal with ONE standard when creating web applications. This is GREAT news. I believe this is the greatest move Microsoft has ever done on the web. Kudos and may you keep it up! Vincent
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Firefox is standards-compliant too.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow, maybe this will stem the waves of defection to Firefox! Of course, as most people I know are running Linux or Mac OS X, I guess that's still irrelevant, but still: great to see Microsoft - for once - recognising that there are good open standards out there (already supported by EVERYBODY else, for years now) and that Microsoft can't continue to pull the wool over the market's eyes. Despite this small step in the right direction, I'm still doing everything I can to stymie the adoption of MSOOXML as an ISO standard. Why not just do the same thing in the productivity space and drop this idiotic push to get MSOOXML turned into an ISO standard and instead adopt the existing ISO standard, ODF, and the rest of the existing open standards for stuff like vector graphics (SVG), equations (MathML), etc.? If MS did that, then I'd be impressed.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Oh I forgot, is it me or is 2008 really starting to make sense? First, we get rid of the HD format war, now we get rid of the WWW rendering war. What's next? The end of the OS war? Now, that is too much to ask for. Vincent
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@liquidpele: I agree and thought the same thing when I first read this. My experience is that IE7 is actually closer to the "standards based" browsers such as Firefox and Opera than it is to IE6. It's not perfect, but I would say it is more than halfway. The biggest part of the pain should be behind us.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Dave, please tell me how ODF is superior to MSOOXML? I need to understand this. Vincent
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is good news. It is a more "logical" approach, it allows older sites to make use of a metatag to maintain usability until they can be updated, and it pushes standards! Thank you again for listening and re-evaluating the approach.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hey, I just want to throw my voice into the chorus of thanks here: I think you guys are making an awesome decision that will make my life as a developer (and end-user's experiences) much better! Please keep up the good work, and I look forward to a much better IE.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I am so glad to hear this. IE7 is a big jump (in the right direction) from IE6 and it sounds like IE8 will finally bring the Microsoft web browser up to the level of it's current competition. Keep up the good work! Please don't make decisions based upon poorly written and non-current sites, lets keep everyone moving forward!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
...on making an excellent decision. This marks the first time I've been excited for the release of an Internet Explorer browser :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks. This is very good news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow!! I'm almost crying with hapiness here!! It takes some courage to go out and change a decision like that!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
woohoo! This is really great news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
In today's news, the IE team becomes slightly less touched. Of course that's somewhat of a jest, but it's nice to see some sanity enter this blog. Though I would have been nice to at least have mentioned the community in the decision making process instead of only mentioning the "Interoperability Principles" published by MS itself. Yah, it was all you guys making this decision. Sure...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"Let's publicly pretend we're going to do something stupid so everybody loves us when we change our tune" Another flawless marketing strategy. I just wish I had thought of it first
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Please make a Linux version. Sadly some website will only run on IE and so exclude Linux users (and Mac users)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This is a huge turning point.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@Reid "Yah, it was all you guys making this decision. Sure..." Ummm...who else do you think made the decision? It wasn't you.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you very much. This made my day! I hope this move signals a new direction and business philosophy for Microsoft. The world will no longer tolerate predatory corporations who build their businesses on embrace, extend, and extinguish. Businesses need to realize that their companies will live or die by public perceptions of their intent, be they good, or evil.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
While I commend making a change with IE8, the question is: why did it take legal action from the EU to do so? (To affect Microsoft in such a way that "interoperability" is a must). And what about websites that are expressly coded for IE? We still have issues with those websites that use Microsoft specific technologies. Is Microsoft going to help address this area as well? As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft still has a way to go before fully demonstrating that their "interoperability" principles are genuinely sincere.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Dean, I have short qeustion on "current Web standards". Do you have any plan to support CSS3 and HTML 5 (in some features). Other qeustion is will you solve an annoying bug, IE save .jpg to .bmp, entirely.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I have to say that I'm asking myself, "What's the catch?" I'm sorry, but past history would seem to indicate that there's always a catch.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I just wanted to say Thank You to the IE management team for allowing the development of IE progress in a truely interoperable way. I look forward to testing the IE8 beta.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
That's awesome. A unified industry can move forward. Those who have been playing the game won't have to play games with funky new meta tags. Those who want to opt out can -- knowing it'll be a temporary reprieve. It's nice to see the voice of web standards being heard.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
will it be able to read object canvas correctly like the other browsers can eg. opera
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you thank you thank you! You just made my day. It will be a painful transition but it will pay off a hundred times over in the long run.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
With guarded optimism. Although the news is actually welcome, I can't help but maintain this guarded optimism and that this action is only due to past/current/future legal action against the company. From a development standpoint, I liked the news that you at least had a standards mode, but I didn't care a great deal for the fact that it played second-fiddle to the quirks mode in the beginning. The point is - do it right the first time and you won't feel pressure building up. It's not terribly difficult to adhere to standards...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you, this is welcome news. Im looking forward to testing IE8 as soon as I can.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@WarpKat: You clearly have no idea what you're talking about... The "standards" are mostly still being written, and are full of ambiguities and contradictions. Making any sense of them is a herculean undertaking.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
It's about time. Sorry if I sound callous, but your complete and utter lack of compatibility so far is inexcusable. I shudder to think about all the hours I've lost to microsoft-only development.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Way to go!!! Finally some good news! I hope you don't disappoint web developers anymore. Even though Microsoft has done really good stuff to HTML before, I was disappointed and disgusted with IE versions 5 through 7, especially with the security problems, and the well documented rendering bugs here:(http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs/)and here:(http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html) even though I did not do any serious web stuff. But I hope it will all change now. Do it, IE team!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
PingBack from http://blogs.dotnethell.it/vincent/Microsofts-Interoperability-Principles-and-IE8.__13012.aspx Congrats!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Finally, Microsoft blinks first!!!!!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
While I'm cautious to trust in Microsoft on this, if it actually happens maybe I'll get back into web development. IE6 was the reason I stopped.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wonderful, wonderful news. I am curious, however, where you plan to go from here. Your initial plan with Version Targeting was for all future versions of Internet Explorer to default to IE7. Now instead I would assume you're planning to have all future browsers to default to their actual version, but how far do you plan on extending this backwards compatibility? When you roll out IE9, will you still render sites requesting IE7 properly? How long will (or can, for that matter) such a plan last? Will IE47 still let people build websites for IE7? I encourage you strongly against allowing such outdated and stagnant code to continue functioning more than a version or two after it was standard. Only by letting old code eventually die can standards ever grow - even legal documents online need to be forced to upgrade eventually, don't be the reason why they don't think they need to.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for making life better for us all, yet again.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Things would be alot easier if a third party was in charge of the rendering engine that's used across all browsers. That way browser makers could focus on organizational or browsing technique & website designers could focus on user experience.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Please do support multiple backgrounds: http://www.css3.info/preview/multiple-backgrounds/ It is not enough. Thank you :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards : Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Breaking news! Good news! Finally! Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team has finally decided to change their previous decision and decided that Internet Explorer 8 will render pages using web stand...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow, this is great news, guys! Thanks a lot for choosing web standards.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
It's going to take a very, very long time for me to actually start trusting anything Microsoft says or does, but this the only substantial move forward I've seen coming out of Redmond in the past decade. There's still hope. (It would be a bit too much to actually start cheering after 13(!) years of Microsoft systematically trying to destroy the open web.)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
@ Michael Diamond -- I'd expect, just like with Quirks, that IE7's layout mode will stay around probably forever. There are lots of apps that host MSHTML that depend on its behavior (for better or worse). Perhaps if IE ever becomes side-by-side, the Quirks & IE7 layout engines can be "removed" from the newer IE versions and just stay around in the baseline system32-installed version.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Good to hear - it's certainly out of character for Microsoft to support standards, but OOXML is really not helping build my trust...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Yay! I'm very happy with this decision, and glad you got around to this :) Eivind.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is fantastic news and I think it averts what could have been a huge disaster and headache for years to come. That said, I hope the IE8 will commit itself to continuously improving IE8's standards compliance and correcting the DOM errors that plague IE6/7. Now that you're finally starting to catch up, don't let IE sit idle again untouched for several years.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards : Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'm really happy to hear so and I'm sure this is a good decision. Even in an ASP.NET environment we benefit from better compliance, so making the best standard compliance default is a win for everybody.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great. I expect the JavaScript engine work faster than safari :) It is shame that IE JavaScript engine is the slowest of all :(
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you very much! You are helping web users, web developers and yourself, as you may now be able to change the negative publicity on IE 8 to much more positive reactions! Excellent decision!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
If it's true, thank you. Abiding by published web standards can only be seen as a good thing.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Out of 229 comments so far, four (!) are opposed to this decision. :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Fantastic decision! Way to go.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
As a web designer/developer, IE has always been the enemy. The design strategy has, for many years, been to create the page while viewing it in firefox as a clear, cross-browser compliant base. When complete, make an iehacks.css page for weird things Internet Explorer does to the layout. This has not always been easy, but necessary for everyone to experience the page as it was made to be experienced. I just wonder how much longer we'll realistically need to support IE6? No doubt, it'll be years, I don't see any way around it. Come 2012, I'll give you more praise for this when my job takes half the time.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
interesting. when can i expect my XHTML to be rendered properly ?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Now, if we'll only see a descent and well performing javascript engine, faster DOM manipulation and faster rendering..! Then IE8 will be competitive! With Firefox getting even better javascript performance in ver 3, IE 7 is generally outperformed as being 3 times slower and horrendous on string manipulation.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You mean that all those debates over metas were in vain? :) Thanks for that decision, I am grateful.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Whyyyyyyyy? You will break many many many web pages! I hope it will be possible for the uset to change the default setting for the mode back to IE7!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you. Kudos for being brave enough to change your minds.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
That's good news. Obviously you listened to the community. There may be hope that you begin to understand the internet as it is. And it ist NOT juts a part of your business. But unfortunately your products IE and Outlook are too widespread that one can ignore them. In the next step, please replace Word2007 as rendering engine in Outlook 2007. And btw: you should choose your discussion partners of the community in the future a little bit wiser.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You should just quickly release an IE9 and IE10 so people running some old version will think they are really behind. To a normal user, IE8 doesn't sound like too much more than IE6. IE10 though... man, I better upgrade!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
this is realy good news :) now al the "default.css+ie67hacks.css" websites will probably work on ie8 by default !!!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE" In fact, it is a call to action to make sure their web content works in any standards-compliant browser, be it Firefox or Safari or Opera, or IE, should it become by default standards-compliant as you say. That is the point of what you are doing. I hope you realize the importance of that, and why it is such a great thing for the internet. Thank you. Also, I sense a surge of anti-Evil emanating from Microsoft's many points of publicity... I am wary to trust anything you do, but I'm glad you're finally moving toward better "interoperability" with everyone else.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
PLEASE provide an option for users to switch back to the IE7 rendering model to handle sites that didn't bother to go back and add the IE7 meta tag. (Also thank you for supporting standards by default! And thank you for back supporting IE7. Really!)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is great news and a decision sure to please a lot of developers. I'm glad this choice was made :)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is abselutely wonderfull news! I was optimistic about IE8, but was so disapointed when I heard it wasn't going to be default on standards mode, but now you are. This is really great! You guys really do not know how many webdesigners you are going to make happy, how much easier our lives will be. Thank you.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great news! And I'd like to add that if you really implement standards well, the standards themselves will provide backwards-compatibility, as CSS and others are always designed with this principle in mind. IE7 standards mode broke IE6 standards mode, because the latter was NOT "standard" at all. IE8 won't brake IE7 in most cases because the IE7 standards mode, although implementing a very little fraction of standards, is almost bug-free. IE8 will provide a superset of IE7 functionality, so it will not cause major problems like IE7 did. Thanks, thanks, THANKS for just doing the right thing.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously." Wow, I'm surprised because the alternatives to supporting STANDARDS have served you so well in the past
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Excellent! Thanks for making the right decision. I can only hope you won't come back in a few months and say something like: "After all, we changed our mind again and will go back to our initial plan". :p
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow - thank heavens for the threat of continued EU investigations!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Good. I am glad that you listened and that you had the courage to change your mind. In the end, this will be better for the web and (as the post itself makes clear) also be be better for IE adoption. But also, people should never forget this lesson behind this. If the web developer community as a whole refuses to adopt a certain misguided feature, then it can have an effect. I hope that the community will act like this again in the future, if any company wants to add a web-segregating feature, no matter who it is coming from - be it Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, or whatever. This is not because it's Microsoft, it's because certain features are dangerous for the future of the web. The same should be kept in mind with other developments, like Mozilla pushing non-standard parts of Adobe's ActionScript into the Javascript implementation of their browser, Apple's disregard for the CSS media type 'handheld' on the iphone, etc.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This made my day. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Digg this, you know you want to: http://digg.com/microsoft/IE8_will_render_standards_mode_pages_as_best_it_can
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
The best decision you could made. Go Microsoft! ;)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Woohoo! This is great news! I'm actually looking forward to the release of IE8 now, rather than viewing its release as a looming dark cloud on the horizon! The web is not perfect: not everything works and most things are broken, but that is its natural state, and whilst it is barable, it constantly improves and gets better. Dont be afraid to fix things! Cheers! Keep up the good work!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
IE8 to be standards compliant? Someone pinch me
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wow, that's great news. Thanks for listening to the community. That's a very brave decision ! Keep up the good work !
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
You just made me consider IE seriously again, thanks and well done!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Reading the interoperability principles, this is indeed probably more about EU pressure than listening to developers. It's a good decision anyway, of course, and I also respect the change of course and I don't want to bash too hard when good decisions are made, but I found the concluding sentence in Steve Ballmer's announcement for the new policy to make things quite clear: "Suffice it to say, we are committed to living up to our legal responsibilities around the world, and we think this announcement is entirely consistent with the legal responsibilities that we have throughout the world."
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Please fix third party cookies in IE8 while your at it. IE7 cookie handling is broke. IE6 works as expected. FF 2 and FF3 beta is broke too, for those wondering. Go ahead, see if you can make them block third party cookies without blocking first part cookies or using third party tools. Good luck!! Opera is the only browser than works!!! See grc newsgroups for more info!!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Microsoft hat sich vor der Veröffentlichung einer Beta-Version des kommenden Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) nun doch (einigermaßen überraschend) dazu entschlossen, die ggü. IE6 und IE7 standardkompatiblere Darstellung von Webinhalten nicht von einem entsprech
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Fantastic you've found courage to do the right thing!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web." Yes it is, and thank you! This is fantastic news.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Brilliant news. While I was one of the few who was relatively content with the meta tag idea, my ideal would always have been for "true standards" to be the default standards mode - I just thought the "don't break the web" mantra meant you couldn't do that. Thank you for listening to this; thank you for changing this. This really is good news - and I bet you're enjoying for a change a majority of positive comments on the IEBlog!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great news! Hopefully this ideology will spread through out Microsoft and make the company much better!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I join all the folks here in saying "thank you"! This is a great decision. In fact, you made me write the first comment ever on a MS blog.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Reading the interoperability principles, this is indeed probably more about EU pressure than listening to developers. It's a good decision anyway, of course, and I also respect the change of course and I don't want to bash too hard when good decisions are made, but I found the concluding sentence in Steve Ballmer's announcement for the new policy to make things quite clear: "Suffice it to say, we are committed to living up to our legal responsibilities around the world, and we think this announcement is entirely consistent with the legal responsibilities that we have throughout the world." And in the press announcement for the planned change of the default IE8 rendering engine: “While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Well done guys - its great to know that things are listened too and can be re-evaluated. A big thank you!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank You. (Please keep up this attitude to established standards.)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Good good. I'm still wondering a bit about the "need to include the IE7 rendering engine" and the "large quantity of IE7 legacy content" though. I mean, the browser is something like a year old. There is no "large quantity" of IE7-specific content (both because there hasn't been time to write it, and because these days, most content by default works on more than one browsers). And second, what IE7-speicfic content there is, almost by definition can not be unmaintained or legacy. It's a year old, so the vast majority of it will still have developers around who can fix it up for IE8. Given these two points, I think the need for a IE7 mode is rather small. That's a big contrast to the switch from IE6 to 7 that seem to have traumatized you so much. That had to deal with content developed over a period of 6+ years, and at least half of that time with no competing browsers, which means it would have been written for IE6 specifically. Obviously, in that case it made sense to talk about a large quantity of legacy IE6 content. Not so much with the switch from IE7 to 8. But that's your call. As long as it defaults to a sane rendering mode, I'm happy. It just seems like a lot of work for you to go through with virtually no benefit.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
No surprise its entirely driven by the legal issue, a bigger stick is the only thing a bully understands.... Still it'll be a good result if it ever gets there...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for changing the default behaviour, applying the 'fix' to the broken part.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
This is great news. Good decision!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Rejoicing In fact in the long term I suspect that using standards will mean that regulatory and legal issues are largely negated as there are a common set of standards that everyone can refer to. For me the release schedule for IE7 was very good and if IE8 can keep communicating with developers I don't see any issue for my business or clients. Well done Microsoft.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Well done! Kudos to the Microsoft IE team for getting this right. This is good for Microsoft, and good for users.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I'll thank you when i've seen the end result, but least you seem to be going in the right direction for a change.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you, I could almost cry :) Really looking forward to IE8's release now.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Oh, and congratz for passing Acid2! ;)
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
One little step for the man, one huge step for the humanity.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks for making the right decision and allowing the web to continue to move forward...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you. Not much else worth saying. Just a big Thank You to everyone who made this happen.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Wonderful! I've waited for this kind of thing to happen!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Another thankyou for listening and making the right descision rather than the easy one.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Congratulations to the EU for forcing Microsoft to comply.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you very much Microsoft! If you do it right most sites that supported both IE7 and other browsers will still work with IE8. It's the ones that were designed exclusively for IE7 that will brake.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Well done indeed. It's truly a new day for MS — and the web.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Please make IE 8 the most reliable IE ever. I mean using IE 5,6,7 I open many print view using GRPS (5,9 KBPS or 48000 kbps). Example http://mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n82-en.shtml sites, I have keep refreshing few times so that all the picture loaded perfectly. The point is please enchanced the IE rendering on slow speed Internet on big print page (sometime mobile review has 13 MB per page, also xbit labs print, toms print, anand print). This problem is very minor with opera and mozilla, just IE that has this problem. Thx.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
How does IE8 score with the new Acid3 test? http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Now, if only MSIE will recognize and accommodate XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml they can redeem themselves in my eyes. JP
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I just have some special request, I really hate to see ClearType enabled on every PC default. It's ugly and makes my eyes bleed on any decent (TFT)-monitor. Might be just me, but nobody else seems to mention it. ClearType should have never been invented, and if they did, never make it a default setting. Probably it has nothing to do with it, but is it 'allowed' according to W3C?
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great. It looks like you could have done it without much reaction from the developers by doing the right thing in the first place. As they say "If you don't know what to do.. wait"
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great. It looks like you could have done it without much reaction from the developers by doing the right thing in the first place. As they say "If you don't know what to do.. wait"
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
rn"Weve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compl
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Nice to MS finally catching up. Only 5 years too late
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
So those 600+ comments DID help :D Looking forward to IE8.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Great News... Now how about ACID3 :-p
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Well done, Dean, this is excellent news. It 'feels' like the right decision, and will ensure that what sounds like excellent work on the new rendering engine will be shown off and put to good use.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thank you Dean and the rest of the IE team. Regards, Rob...
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Hey great, too bad this had to be handed down from above (under pressure from the EU probably) and now all of the sudden you 'feel think it's the better choice'. But in the end it doesn't matter if you dress it up with weasel words, it's a good decision for use developers and I believe for most users as well.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Thanks this is great news. The transition was always going to be a bit painful but we are moving in the right direction, now. Great , thanks!
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
With details of Internet Explorer 8 starting to trickle out, one of the key decisions that will impact
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
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Anonymous
March 03, 2008
I gave you guys a lot of sh*t on the A List Apart boards when the initial announcement was made as well as follow-up articles. I'm coming here to say thank you for reversing your decision and taking all of our comments into consideration.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Unfortunaly there are some reasons companys and private people will stay with older versions of IE. Is there a strategie to get most IE6 and may IE7 updated?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
It feels good to be right doesn't it? Congratulations.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you, thank you. Happy, Happy, joy, joy. This will save huge amounts of development time!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you, thank you. Happy, Happy, joy, joy. This will save huge amounts of development time!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
After working with web standards for many years I have a question. Many companies, such as Mozilla, AOL (Netscape) and Opera have long claimed to develop their browsers according to W3C recommendations. But sadly, there are still features in HTML/XHTML and CSS that displays differently between these browsers, even though the code is written correctly, according to W3C recommendations. Why is that? Are we to expect that IE8 will follow the W3C recommendations, or will we have another browser saying it's compatible with web standards without being so?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you! The news reached me in the middle of a project that has to work in IE 5.0 through 7.0 and beyond, and I was just trying to decide whether or not to tag it "edge" to support some of the extras in the future. :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Excellent news. Now that the matter of the default rendering mode has been settled, hopefully the meat of the IE team's "X-UA-Compatible" proposal will gain greater traction.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Great. Fantastic. Good decision. A very promising start. Now all we need is for Microsoft to move further along this correct direction after this admirable first step. SVG compliance, Xforms, ODF (native support), other W3C/IETF Standards ( as here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3C_standards#Standards ). While you are at it, it would be nice to see open codecs supported too ... FLAC, ogg vorbis, theora and dirac would be a great start there. Drop the proprietary Silverlight, and support JavaFX. When Microsoft finally starts to catch up in this area, there will be much global rejoicing.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you microsoft, the best choice, seriuosly , Thank you so much for that step . It's hard but nobody said that the right way is easier. congratulations microsoft. :D
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Hey, since browsers have the separate rendering modes built in, would it be possible to have a feature where you could view a page through a specific rendering mode on the fly? For example, if I'm using shiny new IE8 and want to see how my web page looks in IE6 standards mode, I cloud click a drop-down and choose that option, and the page would be re-rendered using that mode. Just a thought.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
"Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web. Shorter term, leading up not just to IE8’s release but broader IE8 adoption, this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE. This topic is one of many things we’ll talk about with respect to IE8 at MIX this week." So let get this right. You are still expecting web developers to make sure their content works with IE8? So how far off W3C standards will IE8 be? Will we still be forced to code odd stuff to handle IE's own perverse idea of how things should be (i.e. NOT W3C standard), or can we concentrate on writing W3C compliant code and YOU do the work to make sure your browser renders our content properly and not how you think it should be rendered?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you so much for doing the right thing. I appreciate the tough situation you guys are in, but I think you made the right choice. Keep up the good work!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
For the first time, I'm excited about IE. This is indeed a good news.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I'll believe it when I see it. :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I could not belive what I read here. Microsoft has decided to turn its back to customer oriented business? Who cares if couple of web developers complain or not? It could have been made standards compliant by default on a later release (IE9?). I am not sure if Microsoft realizes that what ever they do, these people will always find something to complain about. Microsoft should not follow the bad seed on this one.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I'm very glad that you have chosen to reverse the decision on how IE determines default behavior. I think that it is a much more logical choice. I also highly appreciate that the MS group is listening to the community of standards developers (not just one or two small groups of them) to make this decision - it speaks highly of a true desire to improve the IE browser and its support among developers.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is actually the right way to go - thank you so much. I'm VERY happy with this, I really appreciate all of your efforts for this judgement. Kanpai for IE team!!!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
6/327 comments opposed to the change...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I can't say enough how good of a change this is. My hat is off to the folks on the Internet Explorer team; thanks so much!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Very good. I'm surprised but pleased. It's to your advantage in the end, you'll see.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
bI am please to report that Microsoft has confirmed that IE8 will use "Standards Mode" (and pass the
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is a great news. It will be better for everyone in the long run even if it hurts for some sites at first. But developper are accustomized to this. With this decision I am really less reluctant to propose IE8 as a browser (instead of Firefox). Now, may I ask, can IE9 support XSLT 2.0 and affering standards ? thanks for choosing this orientation.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Amazing ! Thanks for listening :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Great, now i can completely forget about IE and making things work for it.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Very good news, showing both the ability to listen to developers and to react on it a reasonable way!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
IE8 -- and i'll still be using Opera. But thanks for playing our game.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Great news! Thanks for supporting the standards.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you very much for listening to the community! You've done the right thing. Also: Maybe you should set a fixed date to drop support for older rendering modes (e.g. IE7). This way you give web developers enough time to change their sites, while also bringing forward the adoption of web standards. If you don't see enough adoption on this date, you can always push this date a little further in the future, but without setting a date at all nobody will bother changing their website. Again: Thanks!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Kudos to you guys. The web will now most certainly take a step forward upon the release of IE8 because of this change.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thats a much better decision than before well done on listening =]
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you IE team! This is very good news.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you. This will greatly help. Good decision.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
IE is not even a web browser. It's a bloated operating system with a web browser included. I'll be surprised if this actually submits being that I'm using Firefox on Microsoft website.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Now all you have to do is force-feed everyone IE8 via Automatic Update, with no chance of refusal!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thanks!!! Its nice to see MS listen for a change. Now if only they would stop trying to force OOXML past us all quick like...sigh...I guess this is one step in the right direction anyway.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. From now on, I definitely count IE team as my fellow browser vendors. You are no longer the enemy. I know now for sure that you encourage good standard awareness. Again, thank you. You rock! :D
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I'm looking forward to watching all the web developers try to figure out how to install IE7 and IE8 side-by-side so they can support both :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I'm looking forward to watching all the web developers try to figure out how to install IE7 and IE8 side-by-side so they can support both :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
In an amazing (and unexpected) about face, the IE team has reversed its previous decision on how to implement
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Excellent decision MS, this goes some way to making the web a more uniformly interpretable place to be.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
IE8 is the standard for web browsing. Let's wait for IE8 Beta 1 public release and feel it!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Does this mean IE 8 will include support for an IE 6 mode, a la <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=6" />?? This would be a great benefit by allowing Intranet systems update IE without having to first recode the internal systems using IE 6 only code. Also, seeing as IE 8 will default to standard mode, and no other browser plans on using it, how about trimming down <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="" /> to just <meta http-equiv="iemode" content="" />
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Does this mean IE 8 will include support for an IE 6 mode, a la <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=6" />?? This would be a great benefit by allowing Intranet systems update IE without having to first recode the internal systems using IE 6 only code. Also, seeing as IE 8 will default to standard mode, and no other browser plans on using it, how about trimming down <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="" /> to just <meta http-equiv="iemode" content="" /> so that future copy-and-paster's know it's aimed an Internet Explorer only.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Please stop thinking about how pages, specially created for ie6 (ie7) will look under ie7 (ie8). Do it as web-standards say. Consult with Firefox. And all pages will look good under any conditions.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
From the MSDN IE Blog, we can see that Internet Explorer will be "interpreting web content in the
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
As a webmaster who seeks to code for standards first and adapt to different browsers as little as possible, I like this change. I hope that standards compliance improves in all browsers to the point where if you have tested successfully in one browsers standard rendering, you can be reasonably sure that it will work in the other browsers.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thankyou! Just to join in everyone else. This is really good news. :-)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I would gently remind this community that until IE8 actually comes to fruition, this is nothing but talk. Microsoft has set our profession, and the web in general back close to 5 years with their sub-par browsers and proprietary technology. While I applaud the effort, the hundreds of hours I've spent squashing IE rendering and behavioral bugs has left me bitter and skeptical. Default standard rendering is great, but it doesn't mean a thing unless IE's "standard" matches the rest of the planet. To summarize: I'll believe it when I see it.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Yes! Oh, Yes! Yippeee! Thank you for at last listening to us poor web developers! ... Will IE 8 reach an honorable score at Acid3? Currently IE7 score 12/100, while others (Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, Safari) are getting higher and higer (from 38 for Konqueror 3 to 87 to Webkit's latest build, with several engines in the 60s marks) After CSS improvements, Javascript+DOM improvements. (I just can't let you feel too happy with yourselves, right?)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you! The IE dev team is completely changing my attitude towards Microsoft. Excellent Job!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I think you made a good desision. Is the "IE8 standards mode" still part of Trident?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you for listening to the community.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I think making another standard is wasting for efforts, you can invest your efforts in more collaborating with others to enhance the current standards for web platform. I think windows by making another base of standards makes life harder for web developers, because they have to make sure that their products and services are available for all persons, either they are M$ customers or not.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@Rob: Using the DOCTYPE to switch between a standards-compliant and a backwards-compatible mode was first mentioned on the Mozilla mailing lists in 1998, though admittedly it was first shipped in IE5/Mac. The whole need of quirks mode came out of the browser wars: IE isn't the sole blame of this — Netscape and Mosaic are just as guilty — IE is probably the least guilty of the three. @Tony: Quirks mode existed before IE6 shipped. The fact that development of IE was stopped is wholly irrelevant. IE6 has nothing to do with the cause of quirks mode. @Dave: OOXML has nothing to do with the IE team, nor does this post have anything to do with the Office team. The decision to make IE8 Standards Mode the default will have been made within the IE team, so OOXML has absolutely nothing to do with this. MS is a far from small company. @Noah: Implementing all of standardised CSS is hard: what do you define as standardised? Everything that's a REC? The former makes little sense as that leaves you with CSS 2.0 which is far too vague to be interoperably implemented. Nothing has implemented everything that's had a call for implementations yet: it's a vast amount, and in a lot of cases it means writing a layout engine from scratch (an advantage the IE team have with what they're doing with IE8 standards mode). @dbacher: Regarding CSS 2.1, it's a stable CR waiting for its CR-exit requirements to be met (which require two interoperable non-experimental public stable implementations) — the people it's not being recommended to, if I'm not mistaken, is authors. @bluebird: Often the differences are down to vagueness in the standards — they often are all right in saying they implement it. They just all implement it in slightly different, but conforming, ways.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. Thanks MS.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Excellent news, Microsoft! Time will show that you made the right move :-)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
It's really good, even if I don't use IE, neither have it on my computer, it's the right way to go. As a web developer, I don't wan't to correct the misstakes of the browser developers, and now the IE team seems to realize the same thing thanks
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
With this move, my faith in Microsoft's web browser developers is fully restored. I have enjoyed the improved dialogue with web developers in recent years. Now you're acting on the suggestions of the community in very important decisions. Thank you so much, sincerely.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is fantastic news! MS is doing the right thing and what's best for the web as a whole... A very wise long term decision. Congratulations! I would like to thank everyone involved in this decision: Thanks! :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is great news. I am so happy that IE8 will be standards compliant. This will save so much time. Thanks MS
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Translation: IE8 will feature a 90% reduction in suckage, this 90% will be replaced by standards-compliant not-suckage. Kudos to Microsoft for that! Will it load and run at least as fast and smoothly as the competition on your own proprietary platform? it would be nice to the users who remain ed loyal...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Congratulations for making this decision, and making it early enough in the development process so that people responsible can begin to make changes to the page. Thank you :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you IE team! I can't wait to try out IE8 Beta 1 :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
THANK YOU. I look forward to the day when my personal pages will say something besides "[if IE] Your browser is unsupported [endif]". I refuse to spend my free time being frustrated at the failures of IE to render correctly....
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Its not April Fool's so it seems like this is real. OMG IN OUR LIFETIME Microsoft using standards as a default.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I think this is a GREAT decision! Thank you VERY much.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I am most interested in support for the canvas tag as per w3c standards. ;-) But i digress, i can't give you an 'atta-boy' ... just a 'bout-time' .. maybe ... atta boy! bout time!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thanks for listening to the community and making a choice that improves on past mistakes. Allowing them to stay in the past and not haunt developers for all future versions.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I think this is a good decision that will, in the long run, push web developers towards using standards instead of relying on quirks in a given browser.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Good decision. Let's look forward.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Browser Version Targeting: Teil III
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you very much. One last thing: please support application/xhtml+xml.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Any chance you can have the Microsoft Mail / Outlook et.al projects follow suit and set default rendering to standard compliant html as well, instead of the word render engine rich text stuff.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
That's awesome. I hope that includes the XSLT treatment of whitespace.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Rubs eyes I'm still sleeping aren't I? Pinches self OUCH! Wonderful news! I'm looking forward to seeing what else MS has up it's sleeve now.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is truly a great day. Thank you for listening to us!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you thank you thank you! You made my day.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/9810/90569557cy6.jpg I would be honor if you guys take my ideas into consideration...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
That's a good news but new versions and updates of IE must be pushed to the user, maybe done automatically, ~30% are still on IE6 ! If 1/3 of the web doesn't download & install new releases, what's the point ? We will have to tweak the css for IE6/7 for a decade after IE8 release.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Terrific news. Now the question is, is MS capable of making a standards-compatible browser in the first place (or the 8th place as the case may be) ???.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Still only six comments against, out of 400. And, btw phil_r_5150: This kind of decision needs to be encouraged, however late it may be.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
It's about time! Finally, some sanity from Redmond!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Nothing to be thankful for. IE ignored standards for the last couple of years in the most arrogant way, and MS (ab)used the pre-installed IE to manifest their monopoly. Now, as they finally have to give in you are thankful? Bah! For what?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
What do we get after 2 versions and what seems to be a century later? "IE8 Standard Mode"? Your joking right? I agree with Connor Shearwood, there should be one rendering engine - why does Microsoft feel like they have to reinvent the wheel? WebKit is innovating all the time (client, standards based (unlike gears) SQL storage), why aren't you just working with those guys already? What do you gain by doing this apart from holding web development back for another 5 years?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Please do the same with your email clients. The next version of Outlook should also interpret html content in the most standards compliant way it can.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I don't know why this wasn't done a long time ago. It's like the Y2K approach - fix your existing IE7 content now so it will still work when IE8 arrives. I don't understand why there isn't a "standard" mechanism already in place for web pages to indicate what features they support, like some meta tag string with a list of browsers and version numbers. But there isn't, and that is why we have been in this quagmire for so many years with these silly web technologies. With so many implementations of "standards", what does "standard" mean, anyway? Well, it's yet another browser version coming down the pike. Something to look forward to, I guess. At least it is a step in the right direction, considering the circumstances. P.S. Will IE8 fix PNG image support?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
All we need now are announcements at Mix for a integrated spell checker in IE, instant search and man this will be a great week for IE.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is truly fantastic news for the internet! Yes, it's a shame that it took so long, and that it took an internal memo to remind you that "interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is" the best way forward, but that doesn't matter now. Now that you've realised and made this choice, ensure that the IE8 standards mode is just that! And keep this up! Let's get SVG and all the CSS3 selectors working too! Using open standards you can help create an exiting environment where innovation is possible again online, rather than holding the rest of the internet back by many years! Well done for making this decision.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you so much, this marks a turning point in web standards. The transparency and cooperation the IE8 team has shown is really changing the way I regard this company and its software.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I would like to 2nd (or 3rd) the request for decent alpha transparency support. Another problem with it is that text rendered above an alpha png, or IE-specific alpha filter, no longer appears anti-aliased. In this respect IE7's alpha transparency support is worse than IE6. What will IE8 break?
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 will render with 'super standard mode'
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
It's Christmas for web developers :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you !!! Next step :) - Toolbar icons you can move within the nice glassy bar. By default, home, stop, refresh etc should all be next to the next/prev buttons. Also support for apng :) i.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Mark: Just don't touch websites or any type of design for now on. If you don't understand it, you really should be nowhere near it. And if your still building sites using tablecell layouts - please go to the next mental house and stay there until you recover :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Heh... so now we are going to see a IE that "works" with standars?... what about javascript?... i would love to program anything for the web... and NOT having to write try {} catch(){} blocks ONLY for IE...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@Mark: The simple answer is yes. A modern website is built to <a href="http://www.w3.org/">web standards</a>, and then <a href="http://www.positioniseverything.net/">lots of CSS fixes</a> are applied to make it appear correct in IE6 and IE7. So these CSS improvements in IE are a big deal for developers, and very welcome news. (Thank you IE Team.) (You can check the XHTML media type yourself by comparing <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/xhtml-media-types.html">this HTML page</a> with <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/xhtml-media-types.xhtml">the XHTML equivalent</a>. It simply doesn't work in IE7.)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Mark, you sites probably work find in IE6 do to the fact that they are plain black and white pages with text, not graphics intensive with cool widgets and stuff.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is wonderful news. Good for the web. :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Hmmm... should I be happy? Everything now needs to be rebuilt AGAIN? I understand standards-compliance, and agree with the principles. But in cold reality it's a mostly esoteric goal, not likely to have the impact some want it to have. I'd guess the "community" that MS is listening to is disproportionately made up of purists. Well here's hoping this goes well :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Why don't you just STOP trying.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Microsoft gaat zich aan bestaande standaarden houden!...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Still can't believe that. After a decade of %$%&/(§$ this sounds much to reasonable for a decision someone at MS would ever come to. Is this a hoax? I must admit that I'm deeply moved. Thanks.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Finally! You decided? Why wouldn't you do that by default... do you know what a pain it is completely edit the CSS after previewing the sites look in Firefox the entire time? Yea, so know I skip between Firefox and IE since you guys can be compliant with standards.....
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
wonder if thier going to add java in again since sun is doing what they critised microsoft for. since they now have the monopoly for java why not add java in again using silverlight to conceal it of course
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
For all the current website builders failign to understand there are already standards compliant browsers out there: the only advice you need to tell them is

develop now for standards compliant browsers, check yyour website in FF, Opera, Safari, ...
next, use conditional comments to fix IE's bugs we failed to fix All will be well when IE8 comes out. If you develop in a mindset here only IE exists, well we misled you, sorry!

Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Does IE7 take out the ability of ActiveX controls to install themselves without your knowledge? If not, IE8 should.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
no, we don't want IE.. its pathetic browser.. LOL
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Microsoft heeft besloten dat Internet Explorer 8 in beginsel de gangbare webstandaarden zal volgen. De
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
IE8 sounds very promising. Is it also going to use less memory than IE7? Firefox uses only 30MB, and +1MB per new instance, while IE7 uses 70MB for each instance. It would be great to see IE8 beat Firefox by using only 20MB and +1MB per additional instance. Firefox also runs only on a few platforms, I would love to see IE8 run on all platforms, like Mac, Linux, Windows, AIX, Amiga, IRIX, Symbian, etc... And like Firefox, it would be cool to have full source code of IE8 too, so people can make their own improvements and mods!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I still don't understand why Microsoft continues to develop IE, but at least it sounds like it's finally getting better. Kudos for listening to the community. I might stop recommending against using IE if this turns out well.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
People, I do not understand most of you. Microsoft is smiling us inthe face - the whole world for years and years with IE. And you are happy and applausing them because finally they capitualated and decided to make ONE good product. They could not add PNGs with alpha in 5 or 6 years timeframe, they force us to program woraround for <object> tag because of stealing patent rights, now they announce they where just kidding and we will have back normal behaviour (they need at least 4 months to implement that change etc...) With Office 2007, Outlook is now using some obscure HTML renderer (borrowed from Word) so e-mail newsletters are not working if you make them by standards (we are back to HTML 3 and TABLE on newsletters just because of them). If hopefully people have really freedom to choice, no one will be using Internet Explorer anymore and Internet will be full of W3C standards long time ago...and no one will care about IE 8 and new pledge from Microsoft - we will do by standards this time, we promise... Of course, I am sure we should, in case of users really have right to choose, have IE 8 couple of years ago and with all standards implemented...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is a joke! Why the heck are all you people so glad about this? They originally said that IE8 would be fully standards complient. And downgrade of that promise is a disaster for all of us
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thanks for doing the right thing!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
PLEASE OH PLEASE make IE8 mandatory for all Windows running machines! I hate those who are running IE6 or even worse IE5.5
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Fantastic news, IE Team! This definitely feels like the Right Thing. Standards mode by default is putting your best foot forward. Even if developers find that IE8 standards mode is not perfect, the option to fall back on IE7 rendering means at least not having to maintain yet another IE8 compatibility layer on top of the IE7 and IE6 workarounds we already have been forced to put in place. Very laudable of you to listen to the community's feedback, as well as demonstrating a surprising level of commitment to MS's Interoperability Standards. Now if you could just somehow eliminate all known copies of IE 6 in one fell swoop... c'mon, we know you can bypass Windows Update preferences... it's time to push that red button!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008

See. The web community actually is able to say nice things to the IE team! I concur. Many thanks for this decision!
Now, what about having a meta tag override an HTTP header? I wish that was impossible as well. It is the exact opposite of how it is done with charset.

Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Interoperability means unhinging IE8 from the operating system so it can't coast forever on its viruslike inability to be removed.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
MS and IE Team has broken promises before many times. Remember IE7? And no public beta until June? Until the beta is released and is throughly scrutinised to be rendering according to open web standards and not hardcoded to pass Acid2, I'll not be changing my opinion.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
My personal congratulations to the IE team for (whatever reason) changing their collective mind and finally working towards a new version of IE that will actually comply with current web standards. I have one request... Please don't make it Vista only. The reason should be obvious but suffice it to say that XP is going to be around for sometime to come irregardless of what MS says. For example, look at Internet Explorer 8 and web standards. ;)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is fantastic news! I'm so relieved :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
One more "thank you." And a request: allow administrators to change the default to IE7 for certain domains and/or zones. That will allow companies to roll out IE8 much more quickly. They don't always have control over meta tags or HTTP headers with certain applications, and their desktops shouldn't have to wait for EVERY intranet app to add full IE8 support before the roll-out.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I would say thankyou but honestly Microsoft should be ashamed for not having done this sooner. Learn to listen...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
The next thing I would like to see is an improvement of the JavaScript Engine! Otherwise companies may well have to go for alternate browsers for better performance with their AJAX intensive online apps. And yes, we do currently recommending other browsers for our applications.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is definitely a right approach to make IE more popular as compare to Firefox. I personally recommend all of my clients to use Firefox as its tough to work with IE specially with CSS. now one CSS for all would really make life easy.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Than You Dean Hachamovitch for ensuring the most reasonable level of W3C standards compliance will occur OOTB. I certainly hope your IE8 crew has studied my suggestion and has decided to redesign Favorites to enable them to be stored in the Windows RSS Platform so they may be loaded and unloaded dynamically making access, usage and maintenance fast and easy for those of us with large research collections.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Congrats on implementing something everyone else has been doing for 10 years... ? It's great to know you guys are finally catching up to the 1990's, but IE6 and IE7 are so frustratingly impossible to develop for without some kind of mystical hoodoo, this feels like too little, way way way way way too late. I tell everyone I know to use Firefox or Opera. This is going to continue. Sorry.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Just to let you guys know… Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the IE team, just announced that IE8
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
the world deserves better than the garbage you offer.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
As the title implies, the IE8 team has reversed their decision to have IE8 render in IE7 mode by default
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@Seth: Nobody has been doing this for ten years. Where do these memes come from? For instance, Acid2 compliance in Safari 3 was ~ 3 years ago, and in Firefox was a couple months ago.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
As the title implies, the IE8 team has reversed their decision to have IE8 render in IE7 mode by default
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Firefox 3.0 was compliant with Acid2 since Dec 8 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 "Firefox 3 reflow-refactoring branch lands on main Gecko trunk. Firefox/Camino/SeaMonkey trunk builds now pass Acid2, barring other regression"
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is great. It means that someday, when IE6 and IE7 are no longer used, I won't be up all night fixing my IE problems.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
You said something like that for IE7, but still id didnt do squat in improving standard compliance mode... Somehow i have a feeling that only thing IE8 will bring is another [if IE 8] statment in our HTML's... But i do hope youll prove me wrong...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I think the web would be better off if MS quit making browsers. All the money in the world and you guys finally see the light? Pretty pathetic.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Good one. Thank you very much :-) BTW, I've been browsing in Minefield (Firefox 3 nightlies) a lot lately. It's serious competition. But Microsoft has always done well technically against serious competition, so I'm actually looking forward to IE8 ;-)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
wow, IE will start doing what Opera has benn doing for years...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Any tech-savvy person in their right mind should be using firefox by now. IE is always too little too late and it's slowing down progress. Web developers have to work harder and cut back features for IE users (Read: MOSe) and it's frustrating to say the least.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!! http://ajaxwidgets.com/Blogs/thomas/ie8_and_standards___hip__hip_h.bb Thomas
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
The team's announcement is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is really good news. The IE team has alot of things to consider when making these decisions. If money and legal issues were the things that topped them over the edge than that doesn't matter. All that matters now is that browser development and therefore website development can advance to a new level.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
“…this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.” How arrogant of you. The web development community does not need another version of IE that makes us do more work to get pages to render properly in it. Why do you make it so hard? It is simple, we write to the standards and IE8 renders the page properly. see how easy that is. I create a page and test it in FireFox, it works in Safari and Opera. It is your job to get IE into that statement as well.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
If Microsoft is to come up with IE 8, the one thing that I would definitely want to see is SPEED. IE 7 takes quite some time to boot up and using tabs is pretty slow. Hope the Microsoft team looks into this issue and help to promote IE again.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Dennis, Those companies are going to have to update someday. They can either do it now, or after IE8 comes out or some magical future day but the web of IE6 is gone and, at some point, IE6 will, thankfully, be gone. If they'd written standards-based pages in the first place instead of catering to one specific browser that only works on Windows, they would not have this problem. People need to plan ahead or there is a cost. They know that now. I have friends who are web developers in the same situation. At the end of the day, though, the companies will have to move off of IE6.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@Dennis Bell It won't cost a company that much to have opt-out-of-ie8 tags added to their pages. Alternatively, it should be possible to use the IEAK thing to deploy IE8 so that it defaults to IE7 rendering. There will be more options for IE8 than there were for IE7.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@Dennis: surely encouraging users to upgrade to IE8 is much less expensive than writing more code to comply with a new browser? We're thinking about the long game here. IE6/IE7 will eventually phase out. I'll be glad when the non-.Net developers I work with have one less legitimate complaint about Microsoft software.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is excellent - this is the right decision and I applaud you for making the change. All the web wins with this... Thank you! -Trout
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I have a dream... that one day IE and firefox and opera...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Well done. Its good to see that the tech guys have been able to convince the marketing boys to take the long view. This decision is better for you, better for the development community and better for the web. Now if only we can see you serve xhtml as an application we can all get on with the business of developing web3.0. Let's all party!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
thank you ! if only it was like this from the start.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
'Tis good news indeed. We shall look forward to a unified platform of the future. Although it has come late, but it is better than never. Thank you guys all. Do as said! Keep up the good work! This is a good start.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Y'know, you could just call IE8 something other than Internet Explorer. If the server/page/whatever can't identify the browser as IE, it should fall back to a more standards compliant version. Thanks.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
@OperaUser That's what I said earlier. I'm hoping someone else will pick up on it :)
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Who cares? Go outside and be with your family.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
On behalf of web designers everywhere...HOORAY!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
All this talk about this wonderful new browser... I'm using Windows 2000 Pro, and I will keep doing so. There are thousands of people out there that will not or cannot upgrade to XP (don't even mention Vista), so they're SOL. If I could, I'd upgrade to XP Pro... but I'm not that rich that I can shell out $270 just to get an updated browser. As long as IE remains a forced part of the OS, with ridiculous system demands, you are going to have to deal with IE6. A comment like "I don´t care if the ie6 users see something broken, so M$ would force these people to upgrade like they do with some programs like Messenger. :)" shows a total disregard of what the web is about: CONTENTS. If I have to shell out big $$ just to see your fancy web page, I'll visit another one. If you're a business, you've just lost a customer. Yeah, rendering XHTML and CSS is all wonderful... but if you can't be bothered to at least offer a plain version without fancy markup (and that's what the whole issue is about, nothing more: fancy layouts), you are a lazy developer.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
P H E W! Thanks for listening to the overwhelming feedback. :) Gosh, I may actually consider using IE8 instead of Firefox. Now, please get XHTML and SVG right next, get a public bug tracking system and fix the max no of bugs and we've got a real winner in Internet Explorer 8.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Please developer IE8 for Windows 2000 also!!! Please.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thank you. From the comments I see above, it's all mostly positive feedback. Few are unhappy. When you had decided the other way round, most were unhappy.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is a very interesting blog. I also heard IE8 is going to parter up with BlingCart who offers <a href="http://www.blingcart.com">shopping cart software</a> in order for customers to be able to purchase online safely. This will help boost online sales to online stores.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Here's a better shopping cart, which is also free: http://www.magentocommerce.com/
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
IE supported XSLT 1.0 relatively early. Please do the same for XSLT 2.0.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I hope IE9 passes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3.
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
is the favicon thing is going to be fixed? or it's already fixed in IE7??
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 04, 2008
I am really curious if the next IE will adhere to the W3C standards at least as good as FF. But anyways IE8 is going to be popular, so webmasters will do something to their sites to work properly with it...
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
This is wonderful news, thank you!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
Thanks guys for reconsidering! Great job!
Anonymous
March 04, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
IE8 will render standards compliant by default
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
It's interesting to Microsoft to open to standards.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
As I see it, broken pages must die to bring life to standards. Standards are not meant to be backward compatible, if some happen to be, better then. The good thing about standards, is that you can build stuff on top of them regardless of the knowledge about specific implementations. You can't do that with the old broken pages. This is better for everyone who knows how to design a Web page. If Joe made something he didn't know about it, he shouldn't have done it. Sorry.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Well it is about time. Maybe you all are figuring out you not own the Internet. Broken standards is why I will NEVER use Microsoft again!!! Sorry guys your are too late. I'll stick to using Solairs and Linux. They are and will always be standards compliant.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Le fait de ne pas renseigner cet �l�ment meta permettra � Internet Explorer 8 d'utiliser son propre mode de rendu standard, � savoir celui qui a r�ussi le test Acid2.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
@Mitch 74 Regarding <button> - I sure hope it is fixed. Right now I'm giving IE8 the benefit of the doubt and not invoking IE8.js on it just to get reasonable failover for (non-IE) non-javascript based button navigation. http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/test/button.html The <button> tag is a lot more flexible too. However, if IE8 fails to support this, oh, and application/xhtml+xml - I suppose these things will have to be hacked in for it. Again. Picking and choosing what of the common non-IE browser features to support is just asking for trouble.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I know that one more comment saying how glad someone is about such a decision won't make much of a difference, but still I couldn't just read this and not give my appreciation to the excellent news!
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Oh, the testcase linked to isn't the best at demonstrating, since he also fixes the failure of IE to only submit the value for the clicked on submission. This is behaviour that works in the other browsers, not just Gecko, and is the one that is convenient for <button> based navigation. It would be unfortunate if once again IExxx.js was ahead in feature support. (and yes, I'm aware a simple javascript can't come close to handling truly complex CSS - it does darn well at simplifying the edges though, and reducing code in condcoms)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Thanks guys, this is a big step in the right direction for everyone. Looking forward to IE8 now!
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Today at Microsoft: -Singularity released on CodePlex -Third party PowerShell GUI completed -IE8 is announced standards compliant Best day in a long time, no?
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Indeed, great news! "Much, much better" standards and no version targeting. I have only one more thing to ask for: fix gamma correction in PNGs. ...and maybe border-radius ;)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Nice Info u can find more information here Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 1 is available for download. it’s a new version of Microsoft browser.This new version has some significant improvements as compare to previous version of the Internet Explorer. http://readerszone.com/2008/03/05/internet-explorer-8-ie8-beta-1-available-for-download/
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
This is the right decision.. and a good day for web developers everywhere
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Too late. Firefox for life, now.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
@Sal: http://www.december.com/html/tutor/standards.html If existing standards aren't to be followed, then they're useless to everybody; so why have them? Your attempt at knocking me down was futile, at best. Come back tomorrow.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I could kiss you. Well, not really. But I'm very pleased that IE 8 will behave itself by default :)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Thaank you!! Any change you would have native SVG and support application/xhtml+xml MIME type ?
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
With this decision the IE8 rendering isn't the only mode they've changed... They've also gone from dominance mode to survival. OK, may be that was a bit strong, but they are only doing this because they know people have alternatives, and they can no longer control how people see the web. <a href="http://blog.vftw.com/">vftw</a>
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Great News! See the enormous wave of relief you’re kicking off here? You made the right decision. Thumbs up! :-)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Thanks so much for listening to the feedback of Jeremy Keith and others on this issue. I was pleasantly surprised but this when I read it this morning.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Approfittando del mio vantaggio in termini di fuso orario sono in grado di segnalarvi in tempo reale
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Ja, vid det här laget har du säkert hört talas om Microsofts utspel om att skippa idén de hade om att kräva en metatagg för att få utnyttja "senaste standard" i den kommande IE8.Från mitt perspektiv känns det som...
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
A great deal of thanks, I hope that the responses in this forum will help encourage decisions like these in the future. Excellent work.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
thank you! this is wonderful news :)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Dean Hachamovitch, GM of the IE group, unveiled IE8 for the first time today at MIX08. There are lots
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
"Tuesday, March 04, 2008 1:42 PM by Javier http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/9810/90569557cy6.jpg I would be honor if you guys take my ideas into consideration..." Javier: That just looks horrible, takes up far too much space and would be an annoyance to web browsing. It aint MS Office, it's a WEB BROWSER!!!
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
K Rutten: That is a valid point, and putting a pull-down option on ie8 or similar and allowing the user to select ie8 mode, ie7 or ie6 would be a major fix for anyone running old software. Or even if you can choose to run a domain on a certain engine. That would fix alot of intranet issues etc. That way everyone could move to ie8 and even the oldies with out-of-date software will be happy. This is a perfect solution actually.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Great decision, very welcomed! (as scores mentioned above)
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I wholeheartedly agree with the very first post: That's great. When will you support alpha transparency in PNG? When will you allow plugins (a la Firefox)? When will there be a clear model for how IE 8 interprets CSS?
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I will believe it when I see it, we saw articles with the same promise when IE 7 was in Beta. Yes 7 was better but far from W3C compliant. IE has become so bad that literally it crashes while opening on every machine I have. I was a strong supporter of IE for a long time,,,, now I don't believe Microsoft when they promise features since their reputation shows that they almost never deliver. Like I said I will believe it when I see it!
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I've died and gone to web developer heaven.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is Here!
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
"One issue we heard repeatedly during the IE7 beta concerned sites that looked fine in IE6 but looked
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
It will be interesting to see the reaction to our announcement that IE8 will have improved support for
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Thanks for bringing some developer features in IE8. But something seams to be still wrong: watch the silverlight.net page in IE8. May there is some work left on the IE8? Looking forward...
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
It will be interesting to see the reaction to our announcement that IE8 will have improved support for
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
I'm stunned by the naive assumption by so many that this is because Microsoft have "listened to the community". Have you been blinded by the joy? Clearly there is something in it for them or they would NOT NOT NOT be doing it. Listening to the community ... ?? pffft.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
Don't lie us, in every IE release you promise that there will be web standards support, but at the end of the day, we the developers struggle the most.
Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 05, 2008
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Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Please add SVG support! It's part of the W3 standards, and it's in Firefox and Opera.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
I will go as far as to say that this is a step in the right direction for humanity! We can start focusing on what the interfaces do rather than making the interfaces look the same in every browser. YAY FOR SOCIAL EVOLUTION!!! Oh - by the way - can you please support the pseudo classes :first-child AND :last-child That would be lovely.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
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Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Praise the Lord! Thank you, thank you, thank you, developers for listening to us finally! Earth shall now realign to orbit and last a couple billion years longer... I take back my harsh words that I wrote in your previous IE8-and-standards-related post. Sorry, and again thank you for this great news.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
So, this means that IE8 will ship with an IE7 rendering engine as well as the latest IE8 engine, I assume. Will IE9 then ship w/ an IE7, IE8 & IE9 version as well? I assume once developers stop supporting the IE7 mode, you could leave support for that out; but when would that happen? Maybe by version 20?
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
I hadn't expected it anymore... Not really used to IE developers listening to the community ;)
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Για όλους τους web developers και web designers είναι ίσως τα καλύτερα νέα που έχουν ακούσει τον τελευταίο
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
I'm not going to push my luck with the newly released Acid3 Test, but Acid2 successful render for IE8 would be wonderful.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
After the furious controversy and rationalisation unleashed by Microsoft’s embrace of version targeting from IE8 onwards, we were thrilled by their u-turn on the decision yesterday. Instead of acting like IE7 unless instructed otherwise, “IE8
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
SVG support is critial. SVG is an amazing file format as it provides much higher quality than any others whilst being smaller
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
I could presume that you will never make it this far through all this applause. My simple reply. Thank you!
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Well, I just downloaded and tested the IE8 beta briefly. Granted it is a beta, but I found it actually mangled my web site worse than IE7 (which is fully XHTML 1.1 compliant... modified header for IE though since it doesn't support xml). IE8 did indeed pass Acid2, although it clearly has a LONG ways to go before it even begins approaching the other browsers in terms of standards compliance. It scored a 17/100 on Acid3 and mangled the rendering pretty badly and stalled on 7/100 for a few seconds. Comparatively the last nightly build of web kit I downloaded scored a 90/100 and looked nearly perfect.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Great news Dean, Chris and team.
Anonymous
March 06, 2008
"But sadly, there are still features in HTML/XHTML and CSS that displays differently between these browsers, even though the code is written correctly, according to W3C recommendations. Why is that" Because the standards are in many places vague, incomplete or contradictory. The actually isn't a single, correct, implementable standard.
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
Well; just as I thought - it broke the web. It broke my site; slightly broke alistapart; broke Microsoft Marketplace; and wouldn't even be accepted onto Windows Update! Now; my employer has several web solutions that I have no control over. They're in-front of the public, and they break. Now do you care to tell me that defaulting to standards mode was a good idea again?... As for implementing standards - why on earth can't browser builder get together and agree on an interpretation. Heck, you don't even need to get together - just make IE render the same as Firefox (go on, you know it makes sense). BTW: Love that scroll-wheel bug (try scrolling down the page when a set of links travel under the pointer - LOL, that's real funny!)
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
For all you who say this is a good idea, and that people who don't understand web standards shouldn't be building website for themselves/their clubs anyway - I just noticed that lots of WordPress blog sites also barf in IE8 too...
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
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Anonymous
March 07, 2008
Just face it, you can't slap in more spaghetti code into the old IE codebase. you're going to have to rewrite the thing from scratch.
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
Για όλους τους web developers και web designers είναι ίσως τα καλύτερα νέα που έχουν ακούσει τον τελευταίο
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
SimonL: All those Word Press pages are barfing in IE8 not because the pages necessarily have errors in them, but because IE8 isn't rendering them properly. My page is one of those barfing in IE8 and it's fully XHTML 1.1 compliant, although I send a 1.0 STRICT header to IE (which it of course also complies with). Hopefully this is a symptom of being a beta and not representative of what IE8 is going to be like come release. If it's this bad with regard to handling CSS when it's released, then I'd suspect uptake of IE8 will be even slower than IE7.
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
I'm looking forward to face big problems with all current live sites ONCE more instead of hacking browser dependant solutions on a daily basis as is the case now. Being a tad skeptic, I'll post you my 'thanks a bundle' when I actually see it happen.
Anonymous
March 07, 2008
My point exactly! If that's the way IE8 renders in 'standards' mode, then M$ will have a lot of explaining to do. Not everyone who uses the web knows or cares how HTML & CSS work - they use stuff like WordPress - over which they have little control. They can't expect to get away with this - the only solution is to test their rendering against the most used non-M$ browser. If IE8 does anything different from Firefox, they've got it wrong (IMHO).
Anonymous
March 08, 2008
Do you guys realize you've been thanked 84 times so far? You deserve every bit of praise you get, this is truly fantastic news. It's the best thing to ever come out of you guys. When IE7 came out, I though you did a great job improving the interface and adding features like tabs, OpenSearch support, feeds, etc., and improved the design tons, but I was disappointed that the standards support hadn't improved much (apart from the few CSS fixes and PNG alpha transparency support; they were nice tasters of great things to come). And now with IE8, first Acid2, then this - thanks, seriously, you've made my day (again).
Anonymous
March 08, 2008
I see a different Microsoft from, let's say, 10 years ago. The realy good news is that now they are listening AND responding.
Anonymous
March 08, 2008
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Anonymous
March 08, 2008
I agree with those who are concerned regarding this 'progress' which Microsoft is making. If it ain't broke, don't fix it...and there are those of us out there who have more to do while running their business than constantly update their site to stay in business, thanks to these bits of 'progress'...
Anonymous
March 09, 2008
Good to hear you've been listening to the web community. Please fix up the rendering issues with Outlook 2007.
Anonymous
March 09, 2008
@Maureen: This really is progress, and it's good for your business too. Previously, your web site was at the mercy of Microsoft's whims. You only have to look at the history of IE to know that Microsoft was willing to change standards on its own and break things without much regard for you. It probably has also made your development costs more expensive than they should have been and has still potentially left many customers seeing a broken web site. Now, assuming Microsoft actually fully does support standards, you'll be able to have a web site developed once properly and it will work on every browser and won't break on a whim. In the short term Microsoft may be breaking it again on you, but in return you're getting a commitment that should prove a lot better return on investment than any of the previous models in the long term.
Anonymous
March 09, 2008
Hallelujah. Glad to see the IE Team can reverse a call without pride getting in the way.
Anonymous
March 09, 2008
WOW!! Thank You!! This is a breakthrough to you guys!!
Anonymous
March 09, 2008
I would wait and watch till IE8 is released.
Anonymous
March 10, 2008
While we're at it, please can you tell us when Microsoft will start writing web pages that actually conform to web standards rather than pushing proprietary technologies such as ActiveX? I should be able to choose what browser I use, and if I happen to be browsing on a UNIX machine then a website using ActiveX isn't of much use to me (unless you plan on releasing the source code for IE 8 in the near future).
Anonymous
March 10, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
March 11, 2008
Great, When I heard the innitial idea I thought it was about time microsoft stopped making browsers.
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Microsoft's Monster (IE6 and Disappearing Margins)
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Great to see things happening.
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Great to see things happening.
Anonymous
March 13, 2008
wow, these are great news, thanks a lot! :)
Anonymous
March 13, 2008
I'm glad Microsoft has seen sense and is moving forwards. I somehow suspect that another record fine is not what MS want, which is possibly what could have happened if they'd forced developers to put proprietary tags in, when the browser in question has gained it's dominance not on merit, but on monopolistic business practices. So.. if MS finally recognise that acting with integrity is the way to go, then perhaps US presidents will start doing likewise ;)
Anonymous
March 13, 2008
I'm glad to see Microsoft is starting to take its responsibility to end-users and society as a whole more seriously. However, as a Web Developer with experience of and to be honest - a hatred of IE; I wont believe it until I see it.
Anonymous
March 13, 2008
IE 7 no good for me! i hope IE 8 not like IE7:d
Anonymous
March 14, 2008
I somehow missed Microsoft's announcement that (in a complete U-turn from previous announcements) IE8 will support web standards mode by default, and thus any broken sites will have to enable IE7 mode by a meta tag. So finally, IE will cease to be the
Anonymous
March 15, 2008
IE8 will behave like IE8 ... wow that's a great idea. You rock!
Anonymous
March 17, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
March 17, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
March 17, 2008
I tested a RTL site with IE8b1 - and to make it short - NOTHING is working like it should. Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE6, IE7 working mostly perfect/good and not nothing is working any more. You should really spend some time on this and many many other bugs. "Alpha 1" is a better version name for V8b1.
Anonymous
March 19, 2008
You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It
Anonymous
March 26, 2008
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
April 02, 2008
So after using IE8 for a while now, there are a few things that are useful for people to keep in mind. 
Anonymous
April 10, 2008
With the release of IE8 Beta 1, I'm pleased to be able to talk about the first round of improved standards
Anonymous
May 26, 2008
原帖：http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html翻译：http://www.newsmth.net/bbstcon.php?board=J...
Anonymous
May 26, 2008
原帖：http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html翻译：http://www.newsmth.net/bbstcon.php?board=...
Anonymous
May 28, 2008
With IE 8 and strong CSS 2.1 compliance, the sites which used to run perfectly fine with IE 7 might break.
Anonymous
June 10, 2008
Bill Gates’ recent Tech Ed keynote and Tony Chor’s follow-up blog announced that IE8 Beta 2 will be available
Anonymous
June 11, 2008
Yesterday at Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 in Orlando we announced some of the enhancements we’re making in Internet
Anonymous
July 24, 2008
Winfuture.de Scheinbar ist geplant, dass der IE 8 früher veröffentlich wird als erwartet und da bekanntlicherweise der IE 8 die Webseiten anders korrekt rendern wird, werden einige Webmaster sich etwas erschrecken. Dazu noch folgende Links: Warum
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 05, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 will render with 'super standard mode'
Anonymous
August 27, 2008
At the start of the Internet Explorer 8 project we made a commitment to great website compatibility.
Anonymous
September 24, 2008
I've been wrestling with this for a little while now and wanted to try and get down some thoughts so
Anonymous
October 22, 2008
Ok, once again some information regarding the new IE8. This product is occupying me quite a bit however
Anonymous
December 05, 2008
The next public update of Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users
Anonymous
January 29, 2009
The New Browser (or is it platform) Wars
Anonymous
February 12, 2009
Internet Explorer 8 will render with 'super standard mode'
Anonymous
March 19, 2009
    올랜도에서 개최된 Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 (영어) 에서 Internet Explorer 8 을 조직내에서 배포, 관리하기 위해, 몇가지 기능을
Anonymous
March 23, 2009
Why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers
Anonymous
March 26, 2009
    Internet Explorer 8 계획을 시작했을 때, 웹 사이트의 호환성을 유지하는 것을 공약으로 했습니다. 이 공약은 여전히 유효하고, Microsoft
Anonymous
March 29, 2009
If you have recently upgraded your Internet Explorer to the latest and greatest final version 8 , apart
Anonymous
March 30, 2009
If you have recently upgraded your Internet Explorer to the latest and greatest final version 8 , apart

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Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

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