We all know the blood, sweat and tears we have put into countless hour of development specifically for Internet Explorer 6 since August of 2001. Now it looks like we may be coming to battle with another problematic browser from software giant, Microsoft. The IE8 team is deliberately making up their own rules again and now adhering to the organizations involved with standards even though they are (seemingly) active members of the respective groups. You would think that with the budget that the team has to develop a decent browser that they would be able to product something worth-while. Unfortunately for the rest of the world that because IE comes pre-installed on Windows machines most consumers don’t know the difference.
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It looks like IE8 is about to be released for beta, there is a Microsoft site up that has various links for downloading the beta of the upcoming browser. None of the links on the page currently work but there are several versions looking to be made available very soon. With SXSW just around the corner it looks like they may be releasing it to the public for beta testing within the next week or two (hopefully sooner). With their announcement also that the browser will work by default in standards mode things are looking good for Microsoft’s next browser version. Once IE8 is released I will update this page with the news. Until then just keep checking back here and on the link to see if it is available for download.

Update: IE8 beta Is now available for downloading!

Update2: I’m not impressed so far, lots of sites are broken on it (this site, CNN, HP, etc). It also does not in fact pass the acid2 test like Microsoft had previously claimed. So far it is a big let down in my opinion. They have added a few features that are irrelevant if it doesn’t render web sites properly. I’ll have a better write up after some testing.

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With the announcement that both Firefox 3 and IE8 have passed the acid2 test, Ian Hickson has been working hard on the acid3 test. The new test will focus mostly on ECMAScript and Dom through Selectors Level3, Media queries and data URIs. The new acid3 test isn’t quite ready yet but it should become ready within the coming months.

This new test will put more pressure on the browsers to attempt to adhere to further standards with JavaScript. Hopefully they will all pass it soon with their push towards adopting web standards as they are written.

Hopefully we will be seeing IE8 and Firefox 3 released very soon. There are of course already versions of Firefox 3 available for download. However, not many of the extensions work on the beta browser yet. Until they do I don’t plan to fully switch over to Firefox 3. I would like to say that Firefox 3 renders pages incredibly fast and loads and runs very fast within Windows also. I’m awed by the new version.

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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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