Chris123NT's Blog

So this is a question that’s been bouncing around in my mind for quite a while now.  The fact is, that while Internet Explorer 8 does include some very innovative features, one has to ask themselves, will the browser be successful in today’s market?

The market for web browsers these days is all about creating a rich user experience on the web.  And part of achieving that vision is achieving true unification across different browser platforms.  How is this achieved you may ask?  Well the easiest way is to accomplish that goal is to achieve true standards compliance, something the IE team was touting at the beginning of the beta cycle.  But the fact remains that IE8 has fallen quite a bit short in achieving the goal of standards compliance.  Sure, it passes the acid2 test, but the result on acid3 is absolutely abyssmal, and the real world results leave a bit to be desired as well.

To this day, IE8 will not render aspects of an invision board correctly (specifically the reply and new topic pages, the text box is rendered incorrectly).  It also mangles other sites, including Microsoft’s own connect site (try hovering over a feedback item and watch the popup flicker as if it’s trying to trigger an epyleptic seizure).  Yes, IE8 does have a compatibility mode, but in most cases it doesn’t fix the rendering issues.  But more than that, the compatibility mode can be seen by some as an admission of partial failure in their goal.  Yes it’s there primarily for sites written for IE6/7, but they have a list on their end that IE looks at periodically that includes some sites that render fine in Firefox, Chrome and Opera, which are all standards complaint browsers these days.

Is there time to fix IE8?  Of course, but Microsoft has to be willing to commit to fixing some of these rendering bugs before release.  And I honestly hope they do.  I may not be a user of Internet Explorer, but I realize that if they do not fix these issues and people use IE8 and their sites don’t work, they will start to look for alternatives that will render their sites correctly.  At the end of the day this could mean a reduced userbase for IE and a pretty decent impact to Microsoft’s marketshare.

I personally don’t hold out much hope for IE8, let’s just hope IE9 will be the version of IE that finally conforms to the true standards.  Hell, maybe they will scrap trident altogether and use an engine that is standards compliant already.