Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
As a team, we've spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.
Context & Ripple Effects
Coming off the first year of IE7, the IE team has spent 2007 heads-down on IE8, and this post is its first public proof point: an internal build now renders the Acid2 Face correctly in IE8 standards mode. Acid2 is the web community's de facto conformance exam, so the announcement reads as Microsoft signaling that standards-mode correctness — long the gap between IE and its rivals — is now an explicit engineering goal.
The story traveled fast for an internal-milestone blog post, picked up the same day by Ars Technica's All about Microsoft and Channel 9, which reflects how much weight developers and press put on standards benchmarks as a proxy for whether IE is re-engaging with the web platform.
First-order effects
- Web developers gain a concrete signal they can start testing against: IE8 standards mode aims to render Acid2-level CSS correctly, making cross-browser layout work less about IE-specific workarounds.
- Microsoft repositions IE's public narrative from backward compatibility toward standards conformance, directly addressing the most persistent criticism of IE7.
Second-order effects
- Rivals whose Acid2 passes were a differentiator lose that talking point, shifting browser competition toward whatever benchmark comes next and toward real-world site behavior.
- Sites and intranet tools built against IE's quirks-mode behavior face a new compatibility surface once a standards-correct IE ships, forcing developers to choose modes deliberately rather than by default.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standards-conformance tests become the public scoreboard for browser releases, and Microsoft's willingness to publish milestones like this one becomes the measure of how open its platform strategy has become.
The trend: Browser competition is shifting from proprietary rendering differences toward published standards conformance as the baseline developers and press judge engines by.