Since getting Internet Explorer 7 out the door in October 2006, Microsoft has kept mostly silent on the topic of its successor. That changed today, as Microsoft made a couple of significant announcements about IE8.

Internal builds of Internet Explorer 8 have passed the Acid2 test, a complex rendering test designed to demonstrate a browser's compliance with the letter of the HTML and CSS specs. Currently, Mac OS X browsers OmniWeb and Safari and cross-platform Opera pass the test, as do the betas of Firefox 3.0.

Although Acid2 has become a significant benchmark for standards compliance, it's not really a true standards compliance test. In 2005, IE developer Chris Wilson referred to it as a "'wish list' of features" the test's authors would like to have supported in a browser. Still, it's an important milestone for the IE and its developers, as the application has been criticized over the years for its lack of compliance with standards—including by Opera in its antitrust complaint filed with the European Commission last week. (In fact, if the release version of IE8 supports Acid2, Microsoft could argue to the EC that it is at least as standards-compliant as the competition.)

Better interoperability and support for web standards are high priorities for the IE8 team, according to IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch. "The key goal (for the Web Standards Project as well as many other groups and individuals) is interoperability," wrote Hachamovitch on the IEBlog. "As a developer, I'd prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers... With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web." A laudable goal, to be sure, but the millions of users still on IE6 ensure that the problem won't be going away anytime soon.

Nice to hear this, but it will still be years before we can stop checking out web page in Internet Explorer 6 (don't know about IE7's rendering system, though). If IE8 is released in 2008, who knows when it will become the most used Microsoft browser. If I am not mistaken, IE6 is still used by the majority of people, and look at how long ago IE7 was released.

I remember reading somewhere that microsoft did not wish to concentrate on passing the acid test. Seems they have changed their decision. Regardless, I shall not change to IE. Opera works far better for me.

In my opinion, the issues surrounding the different versions of IE may border more on hardware capabilities than on anything else; for instance IE7 will only run on winxp sp2 not later, and this requires a certain amount of system resources than what is required to comfortably run winxp sp1 or say home edition.
More system requirements means system upgrades (RAM, HDD space, Processor) and so on, which you will agree do not come cheap. So I just wish they will consider cost implications when releasing new programs n oses like win vista for instance and longhorn.