And here comes IE8.

While I am glad IE6 is finally getting ditched by Microsoft, I am still frustrated by two things:

  • The browser update still isn’t being forced on client machines
  • IE8 will continue the legacy of IEs history of lack of compliance and standards support

Yeah. While there is reason to feel good about today’s rollout, there is still much to be wary of down the road.

True, Internet Explorer 8 will be more compliant than versions past, except for one thing: it will give the developer the option of making the browser render as an old version. With the addition of a meta tag in the header of a site, you can tell the IE browser to render the page as if they were using IE5, 6, or 7.

Yep. Thats right. Microsoft, instead of encourage things to get better is now even more so encouraging things to stay the same. Way to go guys. This is why we all hate your browser. Why is it that Microsoft has to go their own way instead of a unified movement to doing things correctly? This is why I use Firefox and Opera. They aren’t perfect, but at least they try to be.

So, while us pro’s will continue honing our craft at cross-browser compliant layouts, newcomers will be tempted to use the meta tag to copout and render a site as IE6/7. It was hard enough making developers see why using table layouts is stupid, and MS just gives one more way for them to continue being lazy.

More information on IE8s rendering mode:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-super-standards-mode.ars