For those of use that watch browsers, and that should be every web developer and designer, it’s been quite a week.
The Microsoft IE team today announced that their work in progress, IE8, passed the ACID2 test last week. Not only that, it’ll be out in Beta in the first half of 2008.
So let’s have a look at what the events were in context and see if they might have been related. It’s Christmas so I’ve put together the “12 Points of Browser Wars”
- December 12 – IE8 passes ACID2 (but Microsoft doesn’t tell anyone)
- December 13 – Opera files antitrust complaint with the EU against Microsoft
- December 14 – Web standards community goes nuts
- ….. still going nuts
- December 17 – Those dodgy mock up photos (or were they?) of IE8 from June appear on the blogosphere as news.
- December 18 – Dimitri Glazkov predicts that IE8 will implement CSS3 Grid Positioning
- December 19 – Firefox 3 Beta 2 is released 2 days earlier than expected
- December 19 – Opera new version of their browser 9.25
- December 19 – Microsoft announce to the world that they have a standards compliant browser in the house.
- December 19 – Those inclined to do so say, “w00t”
- See 3.
- Go back to 1.
As well as looking like very good news for the future of standards compliance in web browsers it also meant that Ajaxian got to publish the headline “IE 8 now doesn’t trip on Acid”.
Now somewhere in there, my Windows install of Safari 3 decided to give up all hope and now crashes on launch. Now that’s a real Beta. Shame really, we’d been getting along so well.
Filed under: Free Software, Safari, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , acid2, Competition, css, firefox 3, ie8, internet explorer, opera, safari 3, standards, w3c, web standards
