Internet Explorer 8 to Pass the Acid2 Test?
by Al
Over on Channel 9, an interview with Dean Hachamovitch and Chris Wilson just went up. The IE team apparently passed an internal milestone this last Friday in their work on IE8. Apparently, one of the outgrowths of the work is that IE8 will pass the Acid2 Browser Test for the first time.
Charles, who did the interview, states:
In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team’s ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who write technology so we take a walk from Dean’s office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky’s office to discuss what’s been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.
The interview is worth listening to for those of us who have wondering what the hell the IE team has been doing this past year as Mozilla works towards the Firefox 3 release. Given the recent discussions of the CSS working group and CSS in general, this seems to be somewhat relevant to the state of browsing (at least on Windows).
I’ve enclosed links to the mp3 of the interview below for playback within this blog entry or you can go to the interview page as well (where there is also the video). Comments can also be left on the interview page (if you have a Channel 9 account).
Warning: the video file is 584 MB in size so you might be better off with the 15 MB mp3 file.
I’m sure that I’ll have more thoughts on the interview later but I wanted to get this out early in the day so those interested in hearing or watching it could take a look immediately.
Update: Now announced on the IEBlog as well (with a mention of “IE8 standards mode” being necessary, which means they have either added a third mode or updated their existing standards mode, as opposed to “Quirks” mode, rendering for IE8 to be more compliant with standards. Go figure.)
Comments
This could be the best news in web design since Firefox 1 -> if they release it in a manner that will eradicate IE6.
But they won’t and can’t…
You have to be running XP Service Pack 2 or Vista to get IE7. If you are running Windows 2000 or other old operating systems, you can’t get it.
Even for XP, it is a recommended download, which means that you can ignore it. I have an XP virtual machine, for testing, that has IE6 on it but is up to date otherwise.
For all we know, IE8 may only be available to Vista users. They haven’t told us that it will be made available to XP when it is released (wouldn’t that be a shock!).
So, anyone using an older OS or XP users running non-service pack 2 or XP users who choose not to install IE7 when offered are running IE6 (probabably).
Asa and I were talking about this the other night. IE6, especially outside of North America, is going to be very hard to eradicate.
anybody choosing to run Windows prior to XPSP2 should not be allowed on the internet. They are most likely pawns in a huge Russian botnet and therefore a scourge for all other interweb users.
With IE7 and their annoying limitations on distribution, web development sucked that little bit more because cross-browser meant three browsers whereas before it’s was two.
If IE8 doesn’t eradicate IE6, it’s a huge step in the right direction but still leaves developers with a four-browser cross-browser headache.
And yes I don’t include Opera or Safari as thankfully they are reasonably standards compliant, excepting their lovely bugs, but they are also pretty much irrelevant in terms of market share.
Unfortunately, a lot of banks and other conservative industries standardized on Windows 2000. This makes it hard for them to update. There is likely to be a significant IE6 presence for years (as in “millions and millions” of people).
It seems like the latest FF has broken Acid 2? I’m on the nightly builds…
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Firefox 3 beta 2 appears to not pass the Acid2 Test. I’m seeing a scrollbar instead of a pair of eyes. :(
Yeah, I see a problem in last night’s nightly. Something must have regressed. Feel free to log a bug in Bugzilla.mozilla.org or I’ll track someone down locally.
Doh! Just as I was feeling smug thinking I was already using an Acid2-compliant browser… :|
It was a few days ago. Something broke. I’ve got one of the other QA people digging in on it right now. I appreciate the report though.
Doh!
Apparently, it is a problem with the server:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409110
Another copy of the test still works fine in FF3:
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/#top
It bothers me that we only get this news now, after we’ve had weeks of people complaining of them reneging on promises, and empty blog for the better part of a year, and all the hints from the w3 mailing lists that they’re just stalling the standards process, and additionally the Opera anti-trust complaint, *filed on the same day as the apparent check-in* but reported a week later…
It all appears too staged.
Except that check-in had to have taken a lot of work. I don’t think that it going into the build could have been timed with an antitrust complaint that they would not have known about ahead of time.
I don’t see why they couldn’t have announced their Acid 2 intentions earlier, would they really have taken on this task if they hadn’t expected to pass the test eventually?
It seems like Microsoft is purposely keeping quiet just so they can surprise us, but I don’t think anyone wants to be surprised – pleasant or otherwise.
Hixie has confirmed that the Acid2 test page is currently busted (not Firefox 3):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172
[...] is great and indicative, I think, of better things to come. But don’t just take my word for it. Everyone seems [...]
Rumors I’ve heard are that IE8’s “standards mode” will be opt-in, for example via a particular DOCTYPE or attribute or similar. I don’t believe Microsoft is planning to make the IE7 “standards mode” more standards-compliant. This could be because they fear developer backlash from “breaking websites again” as with IE6->IE7, or it could be because they want people to code webpages that specifically ask to be rendered in “IE8 mode” (forcing other browser vendors to add a third rendering mode for parity), or who knows why.
Peter, how could Standards Compliance mode be opt-in when IE8 works on the live Acid 2 test page?
They added a third mode. I’ve followed itnerviews, the HTML WG etc all along.
We are going to get a third rendering mode in IE8. But we will only be able to use it, when we opt-in. This can be concluded from Chris Wilson’s statements over the last year. Remember, IE7 broke many IE6 site, this shall not happen with IE8. Thus a third rendering mode.
There’s also the possibility that the HTML5-Doctype will be one of the opt-in keys to the “very standards mode”.
your mirror ACID2 page also has a 404 issue!
Great timing for them to have a bloody 404.
Daniel,
Yeah, I’ve re-looked at the discussions from earlier in the year in the HTML WG with Chris. I expect that it is a third mode as well. I didn’t see any final decisions in the previous discussions of it but Chris did say that Microsoft would either implement an agreed upon standard for this or, if one was lacking, they’d still do versioning of html…
I don’t think anything like this will be standardized, as this is mostly a problem of Microsoft. In a recent IRC Chat Wilson said the opt-in will probably be a meta-tag. This doesn’t seems optimal but shouldn’t do any harm.
There was also the discussion that HTML5’s doctype really should opt-in automatically. I hope this IE-future is just half as interesting as I currently think it is :)