Much has been written about the 8th version in the Internet Explorer line and whilst the *news is good, unfortunately there is no escaping IE6 and 7 in the foreseeable future.
The IE dev team
at Microsoft genuinely seem to want produce a good standards compliant
browser but I suspect the big brass at Microsoft are scared of breaking
the long list of web applications that were built during *IE6’s reign.
This was evident when Microsoft announced that IE8 would render websites with the IE7 engine by default
and require a meta tag to force it into standards mode. This seemed
like sound logic on the surface but it was short sighted and caused an uproar amongst the web community. Microsoft, to its credit, relented and now IE8 will render in all its standards compliant glory
(I’ll get to that in a minute) by default. Sure some old applications
will break, but that’s the price of progress. Any vendors who refuse to
fix the issues can insert the appropriate meta tag and party like its
1999!
One CSS to rule them all.
Don’t get me wrong, IE6 was a great browser when it was launched almost 10 years ago, but the web has moved on and IE6’s erraddic css support and quirky bugs
make’s developing websites to support it difficult and costly. IE7 was
a small step but it was really 6.5. Several of the bugs from IE6 remain
and css support was only marginally improved.
So the only question left to answer is how good IE8 ends up being.
None of the current crop of browsers are perfect but we seem to be
getting closer to the holy grail of one css for everyone devoid of
nasty hacks. As I said earlier, it will be a while before it happens,
but we seem to be on the right track.
