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IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test 555

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the one-small-step-for-ie dept.
notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."
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IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test More

IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test

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  • So let's geek this out (Score:5, Funny)

    by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:02PM (#21757950) Homepage Journal
    If it takes until version 8 to support Acid 2, or 2^3,
    then, when Acid 3 comes out, we can expect conformance by IE27?

    • Re:So let's geek this out (Score:5, Informative)

      by hcmtnbiker ( 925661 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:10PM (#21758076)
      You might note that only a couple browsers completely pass it. [wikipedia.org] Officially released web browsers that pass there is only Konqueror, Safari 2.02; firefox does not make the list. So ~97% of all browsers don't pass it.

    • Re:So let's geek this out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilMonkeySlayer ( 826044 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:35PM (#21758446) Journal
      I find it something of a curious coincidence that as soon as Opera starts asking the EU to take legal action against MS and the little web developer revolt a while ago about the distinct lack of any information coming from the IE team regarding 8 that all of a sudden we have this "we'll be passing the acid2 test".

      I can't help be slightly suspicious. I'll believe it when I see it.

      • Re:So let's geek this out (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ozmanjusri ( 601766 ) <aussie_bob@hoMOSCOWtmail.com minus city> on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:58PM (#21758698) Journal
        I can't help be slightly suspicious.

        It explains why they've switched [microsoft.com] to the Word rendering engine for Outlook. The fewer places they're standards compliant, the better for their lockin.

      • Re:So let's geek this out (Score:5, Funny)

        by TedTschopp ( 244839 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:32PM (#21759078) Homepage
        Actually it all happened when someone cornered Bill Gates about how the IE team hadn't been communicating like he had promised they would, and how they were behind in their deliverables.

        I would have loved to be in the Room when the call came in.

        "Please hold for Bill Gates."
        --CRAP, what did I do now--
        "Hey, Junior, why did you make me look like an ass in front of the whole world?"
        "Ummm..."
        "SHUT UP AND DON'T TALK. I just got out of an interview, and they asked me why you were are not communicating. Don't answer that. You know how I hate interviews. You also know how I hate looking like an ass. You also know I told the world we would release IE8 in early 2008. So what gives. Do I need to fire you all and rebrand a version of FireFox as IE8? Cause I'm this close to doing it. Its people like you who give this company a bad name. Now stop wasting my time, start communicating, and the next time we talk you had better have numbers on how many people are switching from IE7 to IE8. If not, please be aware that the next group guy you talk to here at Microsoft will be our security guards escorting you off property. Oh, and by the way, Channel 9 will be there in the morning. The marketing department will be there in the afternoon, and you have been registered in the company communication 101 classes that are offered the first week of every month in Redmond. I've already spoken to the trainer and she is looking forward to working with you each month for the next year. I also what you to be aware that all this work will not impact our deliver date of 1st Quarter 2008.
        "Why are you still on the phone. I thought you had code to check in."
        -click-

        Lesson: Never make the richest guy in the world look like a liar. Especially if he is signing your paycheck.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by notaprguy ( 906128 ) *
        They passed the AcidTest before Opera filed the brief with the EU so...come up with conspiracies elsewhere.

  • Appropriate Tag (Score:5, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark&seventhcycle,net> on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:04PM (#21757970) Homepage
    I think the holyshit tag would be appropriate here.

    • Re:Appropriate Tag (Score:5, Funny)

      by sootman ( 158191 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:33PM (#21758416) Homepage Journal
      How cyclical: first there were tags... then there were people using tags for comments... I've seen tags that said 'dontcommentintags'... and now there are comments suggesting how to tag. :-)

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:40PM (#21758506)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Only with standard DOCTYPE (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WK2 ( 1072560 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @09:11PM (#21759448) Homepage
        To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.

        Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.

        I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Kelson ( 129150 ) *

          I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad.

          Just out of curiosity, are you an iCab [icab.de] user?

        • Netscape (Score:3, Insightful)

          by emj ( 15659 )

          most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.


          Netscape started it!

  • I bet this means... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "standards mode" IE will only be available for vista.

  • Would anyone mind if.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iknownuttin ( 1099999 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:04PM (#21757974)
    ...so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7

    Would anyone mind if they had rewrite their web pages or at the very least, remove the code that checks for the version of IE and if it is IE in the first place? I wouldn't mind.

  • ACID (Score:2, Funny)

    by eneville ( 745111 )
    Acid test? Ok... but can it withstand a chair?

  • Cool. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:04PM (#21757980) Journal
    I guess when Bill Gates asks what the hell is going on [slashdot.org], he gets results!
  • This article is like saying web developers who wrote HTML for Mosaic shouldn't rewrite their code to fit ACTUAL standards, but rather modify their code to work best with Mosaic.
    IE is such bloat-ware to begin with, why don't they just have the browser analyze the code, and see which engine it will render with better, IE ...,5,6,7,8,...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave562 ( 969951 )
      The way I read the following comment ...

      Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards.

      ... is...IE was doing things with web pages before there were standard ways to do those things. So IE needs to continue to support the IE way of doing things, in addition to the standard way of doing them. I could be wrong about this one,

    • Given the prevalence of dirty hacks to use HTML for layout, how do you know which result is "correct"? Heck, how do you know even know who decides what's correct, the user or the web developer?

  • I wonder if IE7 will go the way of WinME. In a few years time, will M$ answer the question "What about IE7?" with a resounding "IE7??? There was never an IE7. IE7 is a figment of your imagination. FORGET!!!!... FOOOORGET..."

  • Opera's Lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PissedOper ( 1205612 )
    How well is Opera's lawsuit with M$ going to go over with this news?

  • Good News/Bad News (Score:5, Insightful)

    by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:08PM (#21758038)
    Good News:
    Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser ...

    Bad News:
    ... in the year 2012 (give or take a few years), when the percentage of web users using IE 5, 6 or 7 finally dips below 5%.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by muszek ( 882567 )
      2012? Let's think...
      1. It took 20 months (Feb. 2005 - Oct. 2006) from ie7 announcement to the release.
      2. It's been 14 months since the release. One of my sites caters to very non-geeky audience (horoscopes and crap like that), so it should be good for "general audience monitoring". Quck peek at google analytics - 83% of people use IE. 54% _of them_ use v6, 43% use v7. It's been 14 freaking months from the release and almost 3 years from announcement.
      3. 2012 is in 49 months... I seriously doubt pre-8 versions w

    • Re:Good News/Bad News (Score:4, Funny)

      by tkw954 ( 709413 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @10:28PM (#21760108)

      Good News: Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser ...
      Bad news: that page has to be the Acid2 Test.

  • what's so great about this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Migala77 ( 1179151 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:08PM (#21758040)
    After all, how hard is it to build a special case for one specific website?
  • Woooooo! This is awsome!

    But now i'm worried about this whole HTML5 clusterfuck submarining XHTML2, and thus the posibility of using a sane declarative language in the future.

  • What, No Comments? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:13PM (#21758102)
    What have we seen recently?

    The people behind the Phantom actually releasing a product
    A Duke Nukem Forever teaser
    Dell promoting Linux
    IE8 passing Acid2

    What's next?
    Dogs living with cats??
  • What's really holding the web back is the quirks mode which still exists in IE7, and will exist in IE8. If Microsoft is serious about standards support, they need to stop supporting 'web designers' who right non-compliant code.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JamesRose ( 1062530 )
      So you want microsoft to not support those 'web designers' who have gone out of their way to support microsoft's browser in the past by writing customized non-compliant code just to work with microsoft.

      Actually, it doesnt sound that unlikely.

  • Dec 19? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:15PM (#21758118) Journal
    So Taco wants me to believe that:
    A) duke nukum might actually see the light of day
    B) ie 8 passes Acid 2

    Its not april fools day, according to the snow outside. Is Taco trying to create another practical joke day: Dec 19?

    Thats so awesomely random, but it sort of upstages my plans of trying to make Dec 20 th a joke day. Oh well pretended to be surprised when crazy things happen tomorrow as well.
  • IE8's release date has been pushed back 3 months.
  • Is anyone else having trouble with the acid2 page? Safari and Firefox 3.0 beta 1 are failing to render it in the same way.

  • So they've realized how untrusted they are... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MozeeToby ( 1163751 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:16PM (#21758154)
    Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious how thorough the author is in proving that this is really true. There's a screenshot of the test, video, and even a screenshot of the checkin.

    It's almost like think we don't trust them or something.

  • Sour milk (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheDarkener ( 198348 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:21PM (#21758220) Homepage
    With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web.

    Soooo... since you have created a community of non-standard web development practices in an otherwise open and standards-based world-wide community, you still feel like you should defend those who followed you in your path of non-standard lock-inery. No thanks. Suck it up and admit you made a big mistake by painting yourself into a corner.

    This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded.

    Actually, that sounds exactly like your first goal. "As they were coded" really means "As they were coded to work with our non-standards-based web browser". Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.

    Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE.

    I'd like to hear about the 'pre-dated standards' you speak of. Most likely, You're talking about practices you implemented in IE that wandered from existing standards, which maybe became stabilized post-M$ implementation. You can't defend non-standardization by blaming the standards for being STANDARDS. If you break standards that everyone is supposed to adhere to, its YOUR fault, NOT those who didn't embrace your specific practices as their own, personal standards.

    We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle."

    How about just making IE8 as standards-based as the other players in the field instead of feeling like you are required to ween your followers from your own sour milk?

    As far as I'm concerned, the underlying goal is (and always has been for M$) in the very $ at the end of M$ that has become so popular for many. You can't mask the underlying motive with excuses like what you have given.

    Suck it up and play by the rules, or you'll eventually be kicked out of the game.

    • Re:Sour milk (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:00PM (#21758716) Homepage
      Most likely, You're talking about practices you implemented in IE that wandered from existing standards,

      I don't think you have the right historical perspective here. When IE was initially becoming popular, the "standard" was "however it rendered in Netscape" - and to "look at the standard" you needed a knife and some goat entrails. I'm all for MS following standards, but I'm also happy to grant them that choices weren't quite so clear back then - and I can't really begrudge them for some of the decisions they made in that context (even if they seem odd now).

      I'm just glad I don't have to do anything with "layers" anymore.

  • Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode".
    Guess which mode isn't the default?

  • Translation (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:29PM (#21758356)
    Now that we broke the web with our own version of standards, we're going to break it again with the real standards.

  • Remember kids... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:29PM (#21758358) Homepage Journal
    ... passing the Acid test doesn't mean the browser's perfect. From http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/ [webstandards.org]

    Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification.
    And, from what I've read before, it tests how browsers handle incorrect code [webstandards.org] as much as anything else--i.e., if it deals with errors correctly. I'd rather have it handle every bit of the spec correctly in the first place, and if it fails gracefully, that's nice too.

    It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an <img> tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago. [wikipedia.org] Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. [slashdot.org] (Yeah, it's been a while, and maybe they've fixed that, but c'mon.... it was 2006!) Too bad they lined up the Mac guys against a wall and shot them, ensuring that it would take almost a decade to get that one feature into IE/Win.

    Feel free to correct me if I've made any factual errors in this post.* Flame if you want, but nicely worded, verifiable responses are preferred and worth a lot more to readers in general.

    * aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )

      * aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.
      Pretty hard to fire a chair from a gun, so probably not.

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:05PM (#21758754) Homepage Journal

      It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago.

      They finally did in IE7, released in November 2006.

      And, from what I've read before, it tests how browsers handle incorrect code as much as anything else--i.e., if it deals with errors correctly.

      That's not the only thing it tests, but proper error handling is critical for forward compatibility. A fully CSS2-compliant browser, when faced with CSS3, will see it as incorrect code. Ditto for an HTML4 browser looking at HTML5 or XHTML1. If there are well-specified ways to handle errors, and the browsers follow them, then you can predict what browsers will do if they don't support a particular feature.

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:22PM (#21758970) Homepage Journal

      And to follow up, here's a page that goes into much more detail on just what Acid2 tests [webstandards.org], including:

      • Data URLs
      • Transparent PNGs
      • The object element
      • Absolute, relative and fixed positioning
      • Box model
      • CSS tables
      • Margins
      • Generated content
      • CSS parsing (this would be the part about handling incorrect code)
      • Paint order
      • Line heights
      • Hovering effects

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by icepick72 ( 834363 )
      ... passing the Acid test doesn't mean the browser's perfect.


      No but the browsers that do pass are in a higher category all to themselves.

  • Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CrackPipePls ( 1205568 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:37PM (#21758468)
    Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the fixes? With the standard breaking IE6, random "updates" that makes IE7 css hacks useless, and now a new "standard compliant" IE8 that may or may not contain other bugs The task of writing pages to support IE6, IE7, IE8 will become equivalent to travelling on a mine field, a melting glacier and an active volcano in 3 parallel universes in the same car at the same time

  • Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by gordgekko ( 574109 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:42PM (#21758548) Homepage
    IE7 is demonstrably more secure -- at least on Vista and IE8 can pass Acid. What will /.ers complain about next? The UI?

  • Embrace, Extend... Adopt standards? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jnadke ( 907188 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:45PM (#21758590)
    Hrrrmm... I always thought Microsoft's philosophy was "Embrace, Extend, Destroy".

    But now they're adopting standards?

    Either:
    1) Someone spiked my coffee.
    2) I'm dreaming.
    or
    3) Steve Ballmer hasn't heard about this yet.

  • I'll get in trouble for this... (Score:4, Funny)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:18PM (#21758918)
    But I have hacked the IE8 code base. Here is the code they have added to pass ACID2: if (url.equals("http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top")) { draw("smileyFace"); }

  • Remember... (Score:3, Informative)

    by xENoLocO ( 773565 ) on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:21PM (#21758950) Homepage
    the acid test is not a standards compliance test... it's a test of how well browsers break on sites that DONT support standards. It's not a measure of standards support for the browser, but it is nice to have.

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