IE8: Going boldly where no Internet Explorer has gone before

If you remember from the pre-Internet Explorer 7 days, when such browser was only in alpha and beta stages, we received announcements directly from developers at Microsoft that IE7 would not be entirely compatible with CSS2 standards set by the W3C. On purpose.

Why? Perhaps this blog post from 2006 can shed some light on the situation.

We heard the feedback from the developer community that has asked us for a long time to move to a more standard-compliant rendering behavior. We are balancing this request with the needs of our customers to not have their pages broken.

In order to accommodate non-standards-compliant designers who designed for non-standards-compliant IE6 (who had no choice really, when 80% of your audience is using IE6), IE7 was designed to intentionally break compliance so that IE6-compatible sites, simply, wouldn’t get incredibly messed up when viewed in the new browser.

So, Microsoft uses their dominant position in the market to edge along. They undoubtedly improved upon Netscape Navigator, the original impetus and competition for Internet Explorer, but once securing the market, their thumbs twiddled, making no significant improvements between IE4 and IE6 — lacking in new features and, of course, sorely lacking in compatibility.

IE7 does a lot of things right, introducing improvements such as transparent PNG support (thank god!), among others, but it still falters with cool CSS2 features such as rounded corners and other miscellaneous effects.

While I can’t make predictions about IE8, I did read something of fair interest today. Internet Explorer 8 passes the acid2 test. Any web developer knows why this is so significant, but if you’d like to get a clue, read more about it directly from the source as blogged at MSDN.