Microsoft: IE8 Beta 2 coming! Is your website ready?
That's a rather odd question, don't you think? I was always under the impression that browsers had to render websites correctly by being web standards compatible and not the other way round. It you investigate further you find out that Microsoft is on the right track with Internet Explorer 8 and here is why.
The question may be misinterpreted if you take Microsoft's past attempts at splitting up the Web by using its own standards for Internet Explorer. This is not Microsoft's intent however this time, quite to the contrary.
The question is specifically aimed at webmasters who have optimized websites for previous versions of Internet Explorer which, without doubt, was not all that standard compliant.
Nick MacKechnie puts it this way on his MSDN blog:
This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.
He goes on by leaking information that the second beta of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the third quarter of 2008.
We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.
Microsoft created a Knowledge Base article entitled Your Web site may not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 which is also the main source of information for webmasters seeking information about compatibility to Internet Explorer Beta 2.
It is interesting to see that Microsoft really has the intention to comply to web standards with Internet Explorer 8.
Update: Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 in the meantime. Check out our review of the final version of IE8 here.
Many of my sites do not render correctly with IE8 Beta 2. They are perfect in Firefox, IE6 and IE7 (I use a different stylesheet for each one).
Some things are so way out it will clearly take more time to fix using an IE8 stylesheet compared to using the “render in IE7 mode”.
Too right GRTerrero. I will continue to use Firefox anyway, Nice blog man!
From Blu-Ray, to ODF, to ISO, W3C, and ARIA standardization, it looks like MS is getting it’s beta kicked all over the place!