Standards Compliant IE8
Well looky there: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article about Microsoft’s release of IE8: Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. It will apparently sport some fancy new features, but most importantly it will (as a default) be standards compliant. After years of CSS hacks and fixes (and then using IE’s control statements to offer alternative stylesheets instead of hacks), this is good news.
I haven’t been a regular windows user in 5 years or so, but from a developer perspective this is very interesting. We went from cursing Netscape back in the day to loathing Internet Explorer and loving Firefox. IE made a nice leap with 7, offering tabs and other contemporary features it sorely lacked. It also seemed to play nice(r) with CSS compared to previous iterations.
But how many people will upgrade? Will there be a healthy roll-out via Windows Updates? The last thing I want to do is add yet another browser to my Must Test list. I guess looking at the logs and analytics will be the truest test.
Of course, there’s no version for the Mac. That doesn’t bother me so much—I think I’ll stick with Firefox for the time being.
What are other people doing to insure browser compliance these days?