I must have died and gone to web developer heaven. On Microsoft’s MSDN IEBlog they are claiming that by default Internet Explorer 8 will be the most standards compliant that it can.

“Basically, all the browsers have a “Quirks” mode, call it “Quirks mode", and use it to offer compatibility with pages that pre-date modern standards. All browsers have a “Standards” mode, call it “Standards mode,” and use it to offer a browser’s best implementation of web standards. Each version of each browser has its own Standards mode, because each version of each browser improves on its web standards support. There’s Safari 3’s Standards mode, Firefox 2’s Standards mode, IE6’s Standards mode, and IE7’s Standards mode, and they’re all different. We want to make IE8’s Standards mode much, much better than IE7’s Standards mode.

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.” IEBlog

What I hope, but probably won’t see, is better CSS standards handling. I myself am tired of having to code around both IE and Firefox to make a page look the same in both. Firefox does a far better job overall in properly rendering CSS formatted web pages. I don’t know how many times I have literally pulled my hair out to force pages to look identical in both browsers.

I can only hope that such is the case and that I can focus on page design and formatting and not so much on the browser rendering the pages. Even the Macintosh OS X browser (Safari) renders pages very similarly to Firefox.

After all these years is Microsoft actually going to build a web browser that actually follows set standards? I guess we will see soon enough, when IE8 is released.

Read more at the MSDN IE Blog

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