Microsoft announces that IE8 passed the acid2 test
December 19th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
As some of you may be familiar with the acid2 test and some may not, I’ll give a little information to help you understand what it is. The acid2 test is a CSS test, a web standards test really. The test creates a simple smiley face image using CSS, browsers that are compliant (safari, opera) show the smiley face just as it is intended. Browsers that are not show something entirely different. IE6 shows something that doesn’t even make sense and IE7 equally shows something that makes a little more sense but not much. Firefox is almost there*, definitely much closer then IE7 though.
However, IE8 which is set to release sometime in early 2008 has passed the acid2 test and will be released passing it as well. This is all according to the IE Blog over at Microsoft, some pretty exciting news about Internet Explorer users (and haters). Hopefully the IE hacks of the past will be no more with the release of IE8. We can only hope that there will be some kind of update to IE7 that will make it compliant also.
*Update: Firefox 3 Beta does pass the acid2 test, thanks Asa.
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Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK that works professionaly as a web designer doing design comps, CSS cutups, Search Engine Optimization, Flash design, and PHP development. As well as a news contributer to various web design news sites and technology news portals.



© 2008 dustin brewer, web design news and style, All rights reserved.
December 19th, 2007
Firefox has passed ACID2 since an early alpha release of Firefox 3. The current latest, Firefox 3 beta 2 passes ACID2. We’re not just showing screenshots, we’ve had ACID2 working for some time and you can download Firefox betas and see for yourself.
- A
December 19th, 2007
This is a great day for front-end devs everywhere!
December 25th, 2007
Thanks for the information. I will be anxiously awaiting the release when both IE8 and Firefox 3 final comes out. Paul
January 3rd, 2008
Man I didn’t know there was such a test exist ,i’m using safari from now on!.
February 25th, 2008
Firefox 2 for Mac is not compliant if this test really works.
March 4th, 2008
Unfortunately a staggering number of people still use IE6. We’ll be putting in hacks for those people until that number drops… because the end-users of a client’s site don’t care about compliancy, they’ll just report back, “Your site looks broken.”
I’d be happy if they’d at least switch to IE7 for now. *sigh*
March 6th, 2008
There will be an update to IE7 to make it more compatible… it’s called IE8!
April 7th, 2008
I’ve actually downloaded and played with IE8 beta, and frankly, the double margin bug is still right there for everyone to see… so acid2 compliant or not, our days of hacking around IE are far from over.