Wow hell is REALLY cold today!
Apparently according to the Microsoft Development Team behind Internet Explorer, the new version of the near-ubiquitous but much maligned web browser will be stepping up it’s fight in the browser wars a bit.
A post was made today to Microsoft’s Channel 9 development blog center, saying that the new version of Internet Explorer (internally known, strangely enough, as IE8) is able to accurately render the ACID2 test!
For those of you who don’t know, the ACID2 test is a test by the Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org) which tests a web browsers ability to correctly display a website according to web standards.
Previously, only Opera and Webkit (the backbone of Apple’s Safari web browser) were the only browsers able to pass the ACID2 test. Firefox from Mozilla comes close, but makes some concessions to accommodate some poorly coded web sites. However, the current and previous versions of Internet Explorer were ESPECIALLY bad at rendering ACID2.
With the IE8 team showing that they are increasing their willingness to follow web standards, instead of previously relying on Microsoft only technologies like ActiveX, (which have been noted as having serious security vulnerabilities over the years), Microsoft may be seriously trying to muscle Mozilla and Opera out of the market.
It’s the Netscape , IE war all over again.
If Microsoft is actually able to create a browser that is competent enough that people won’t feel the need to move to another browser like Firefox, they will have won the war again. Since every Windows PC comes with a copy of IE.
Now, despite the fact that there seems to be a serious anti-microsoft sentiment growing in the market, with many people (myself included) switching to mac or linux, we aren’t there yet. So a good version of IE might just get people to hang on to a windows machine just a bit longer.
Things are starting to get interesting..