In a startling turn of events, Microsoft has reversed an earlier
stupid brain-dead decision, and is actually doing the right thing.
Internet Explorer 8 will have much better support for modern web
standards than IE7 (which in turn has slightly better support than
IE6). Apparently the internal builds already pass
ACID2
(IE7 and Firefox 2 do not; Firefox 3 and the current versions of
Safari and Opera do). However, the original plan was to only enable
this improved standards support if the web developer specifically
requested it by adding a special META tag; by default, IE8 was to
operate in an IE7 compatibility mode. The goal was to avoid the
problem of non-standards-compliant sites breaking when users upgrade
their browser, which is what happened when people upgraded from
IE6 to IE7, but it would have caused serious problems in the
future.
Basically, it was a really bad idea, but Microsoft has
changed their minds. They're doing the right thing, because
it's the right thing to do. The last time I remember Microsoft
going out of its way to do the right thing with IE was when they
met with the Mozilla team in November 2005 to discuss using the
same icon for RSS feeds in IE7 and Firefox.
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