Not that you need me to tell you this...

  • Article

...but IE8 now correctly renders the Acid2 smiley face in IE8 standards mode.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    Congatulations!!! Seriously. Dude. I was NOT expecting this. Guess we finally discover the/a reason for the delay on any news, you guys were waiting to drop the bombshell! Thank you so much! You DO care!

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    First of all, congratulations. I didn't think I'd ever see the day that MSIE passed the Acid2 test. Smiley faces all round! Second, the bad bit. Why don't you tell us what you are up to? Why is everything shrouded in secrecy? You would get a lot less flak if you gave developers a tiny clue as to where you are headed. It seems that you are doing some good work on the IE project team. Share a little of that with us and you won't get beaten up so badly in the blogs. ;-) Congrats again. Really.

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    We love you, man, in a completely non-stalker sort of way.

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    Yeah, I agree with Dean Edwards: what's up? I'm an ASP.NET developer, so I do both server side .NET development and client side HTML and CSS. There is so much more information, excitement, positive development in/around .NET then there is for IE. It really seems like the whole .NET and so called Developer Division is like the 'new' Microsoft while IE is still very much the 'old' Microsoft.

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    Having said that (in my previous comment) I think IE is not part of the developer division, is that right? The latest post on the IE blog also shows that your are not using Team System (at least not for source control, I can see that from the //depot path, which looks like Perforce). If you use Team System, you might be able to open up a project on Codeplex to gather developer feedback in the form of work items etc. Looking forward to your reactions!

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2007
    Chris, that's a great news! Are you guys planning to work with front-end developers like you did with IE7? I feel that would help a lot!

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2007
    Hey Chris, I posted thanks on the IE blog already but it's worth passing on again. Hopefully this will really help push the web forwards. This is an excellent early Christmas present. The problem though is the rate of update of browsers. IE7 is only now pushing over 50% of IEs for us, and IE6 isn't going to go below our support spectrum for a long time (for us this would be somewhere below around 1% of visitors). Unlike Firefox (which has an excellent updating system to the point that we can usually drop older versions within 6 months) IE is tied to the OS and can only be updated via OS updates. So I suppose my two questions are:

  1. Is IE7 going to be a part of XP SP3?
  2. Is IE8 going to be available for XP? A yes to either of those will be good; a yes to both of them would be fantastic.

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2007
    Great Christmas present. Glad you spent time on this rather than wasting time responding to continual pointless comment posts on the IEBlog.

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2007
    @Dean + Mike Just one man's opinion here: http://www.d-boss.com/comment/jm-on-ie.htm#101207

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2007
    Congratulations. However, I hope you are aware of the recent server problems of the Wasp-Server. Would be a shame if you were testing with a broken test. Well, sorry for bad-thinking. I didn't expect this. I can't wait to test a beta :) @JackP: From Chris's previous posts, comments and interviews it should be very clear, that IE8 will get a third rendering mode. This is neccesary for backwards compatibility. It is unclear how, but there's a distinct probability that web devs will have to opt-in to the new mode (that's actually great, since currently available websites won't break as much as they did when IE7 was released:)).

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2007
    Thanks so much for keeping the community updated. This stuff matters; trust has to be regained. Looking forward to big things in IE8.

  • Anonymous
    December 24, 2007
    This is great news. Of even greater news I believe is that hasLayout is history in IE8. I wonder what other surprises are coming?

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2007
    It's awesome news and you of all people should get to tell us ;) Like many others I don't quite get why it had to be kept secret, but it's a clear signal that IE is getting so much closer to the other browsers - we can start getting excited ;)

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    Um... if IE8 requires a specific "I really want it to be rendered according to standards, honest guv, yes I do" mode that needs to be specifically triggered, then IE8 DOESN'T pass ACID2. It might render a hacked-up version of the ACID2 page successfully, but that's not the same thing. And that's rather unfortunate, since you've gone to all the trouble to tell people you DO pass ACID2. That's why I think it is critical for IE8 to trigger new "proper standards mode" in the same way that the previous standards mode was triggered - using a proper DOCTYPE and so on. Or at least by some other method WITHIN current standards... Otherwise IE is continuing to propagate the non-standard route after all... And let's face it, if someone has gone to the trouble of building a DOCTYPE and valid code, then they probably DO want their page to render according to standards. Don't make us developers jump through even more hoops. Please.

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    Meta tags I could live with! Particularly if it was some sort of meta tag that wasn't IE8 specific and therefore could be picked up on and used by other browsers. What I don't want to have to do are insert conditional comments and the like everywhere... Oh and yeah, Chris, well done and all that. Didn't mean to be adding to the negativity!

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2008
    I don't care how it looks as long as is won't disturb standard based code. Frankly, other browsers shouldn't include this meta-tag. For them, the doctype switch is more than enough. Don't forget: We aim to remove separate engines, not adding many more. The meta-tag-solution is neccesary for IE, but to introduce it within other browsers would only cause more confusion.

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    Having said that (in my previous comment) I think IE is not part of the developer division, is that right? The latest post on the IE blog also shows that your are not using Team System (at least not for source control, I can see that from the //depot path, which looks like Perforce). If you use Team System, you might be able to open up a project on Codeplex to gather developer feedback in the form of work items etc.

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    @JackP: From Chris's previous posts, comments and interviews it should be very clear, that IE8 will get a third rendering mode. This is neccesary for backwards compatibility. It is unclear how, but there's a distinct probability that web devs will have to opt-in to the new mode (that's actually great, since currently available websites won't break as much as they did when IE7 was released:)).

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    You probably know the problem here. If I wrote for IE 7 and now there's IE8, the CC won't be used in IE8, although we're still in the old mode. Can you shed some light on this, please? Oh, a bit too late, but .. happy new year :)

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2008
    @Webhosting, Vista, et al - We're still thinking about freezing conditional comment version vector (and UA string).  My gut instinct tells me we should leave the strategy alone there (i.e. even in IE7 mode, IE8 would have an IE8 UA string and an IE8 version for conditional comments), because code will change (for security reasons, etc).

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    But will it do so when released? The META tag enabling IE8 rendering isn't part of the Acid2 test. So how can it pass?

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2008
    Not without some silly extra tag it won't.

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2008
    Like many others I don't quite get why it had to be kept secret, but it's a clear signal that IE is getting so much closer to the other browsers - we can start getting excited ;)thank you!

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2008
    The problem though is the rate of update of browsers. IE7 is only now pushing over 50% of IEs for us, and IE6 isn't going to go below our support spectrum for a long time (for us this would be somewhere below around 1% of visitors).

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2008
    Having said that (in my previous comment) I think IE is not part of the developer division, is that right? The latest post on the IE blog also shows that your are not using Team System (at least not for source control, I can see that from the //depot path, which looks like Perforce). If you use Team System, you might be able to open up a project on Codeplex to gather developer feedback in the form of work items etc.

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2008
    Art, I think you are totally right here

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2008
    Not that you're a bad guy Chris, you're a great guy, and I love your work lately with the WHATWG and W3c and company... But very simply, IE8 doesn't pass Acid2, that's just rubbish. Keep up the good work!

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2008
    Congratulation and many thanks not only for this one but for your entire blog. Finally, there´s light at the end of the tunnel. I almost despaired with IE8!

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2009
    We're still thinking about freezing conditional comment version vector (and UA string).  My gut instinct tells me we should leave the strategy alone there (i.e. even in IE7 mode, IE8 would have an IE8 UA string and an IE8 version for conditional comments), because code will change (for security reasons, etc).

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2009
    We love you, man, in a completely non-stalker sort of way.

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2009
    Chris, just one question. Are you going to freeze the two old modes, so even the version vector for Conditional Comments will stay the same in them? You probably know the problem here. If I wrote for IE 7 and now there's IE8, the CC won't be used in IE8, although we're still in the old mode. Can you shed some light on this, please? Oh, a bit too late, but .. happy new year :)

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2009
    Thank You Very Mach... CC IE8 olarak kullanılmayacaktır. Bu, lütfen bir ışık tuttu miyim?

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2010
    We're still thinking about freezing conditional comment version vector (and UA string).  My gut instinct tells me we should leave the strategy alone there (i.e. even in IE7 mode, IE8 would have an IE8 UA string and an IE8 version for conditional comments), because code will change (for security reasons, etc).

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2010
    It looks so amazing!