NEWS
Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn't due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning website owners that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.
As part of this week's IE June security update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, 'IE+EmulateIE7' - which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE8 Beta 1 testers.
In an IE Blog posting on 10 June, members of the IE team reminded site owners - many of whom had designed their sites to display correctly in less-standards-compliant, prior versions of IE - that they need to "get ready" for IE8 so that their content will "continue to display seamlessly".
Microsoft decided earlier this year that it will make 'super-standards' mode the default with IE8. This is one of three modes which will be supported in IE8. The other two are 'quirks' mode, which will be compatible with current IE pages and applications, and a 'standards' mode, which will be the same as what's offered by IE7 and "compatible with current content".
Microsoft originally planned to make the super-standards mode an opt-in choice and the IE7 standards mode the default - claiming that by doing so, Microsoft would ensure better backwards-compatibility with existing websites and applications. But critics claimed Microsoft was shirking its commitment to make IE more standards-compliant.
Microsoft released a first beta of IE8 in March. Company officials have declined to say when the final version of IE8 will ship.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Beta is expected to have problems of course, but when I tried Beta 1 it was very far from standards compliant and still did not respect standard css. I found it impossible to browse many sites, including some of my own.
I will wait for it to mature before I start using it personally, but I am concerned that it may break some of my sites if it does not respect the standards
2. Richard A
Hopefully this will have positive fallout for Safari users who currently suffer all manner of incompatibilities with badly coded sites.
Since most developers only ever test on the far-from-standards-compliant IE, it seems many sites are tailored for the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Microsoft's browser. The result is that Safari misrenders many of these poorly coded, non-standards compliant sites.
Apple's response has always been that Safari is standards compliant and it is the rest of the world that should change. Nothing new there...
Maybe, if IE - the de facto standard (natch) - starts to conform to official web standards, web developers will finally be forced to write proper code that works on a range of browsers, not just boring old clunky Internet Explorer.
Web 1.1 here we come...?
3. Dom
Being a Linux Zealot, I have to praise Microsoft latest efforts to make IE standard compliant
4. Linda Hollars
my existing internet explorer 7 stopped working out of nowhere. Each time I would try to log on it would show then disappear instantly. I tried to download internet explorer 8 and it did the same thing. What a pain. Thank goodness for moxilla firefox. Good old reliable.. Now when I downloaded the I.E. 8 and it did the same thing, came up then disappeared.. So I tried downloading it again, my system says its on my computer already. Right, and it still will not log on so its useless. Microsoft get your act together!