by Kyle Weems 6.March 2008 12:49
Sometimes browser makers must feel like someone so unpopular at school that no matter what you do, somebody's going to kick you in the nuts in gym class. Repeatedly.
Microsoft made the annoucement recently that they're going to make IE8 target standards mode by default (as I discussed here). This is big. As Microsoft is sitting on the heap of Internet usage like a giant ape, the compliance of it's browser makes a huge impact on the difficulty a web designer's life. By and large, most people were happy, even if they weren't 100% sold on the motivation for the move. After all, we complained, they listened, and ultimately they did the right thing and are embracing standards.
This doesn't mean their woes are over, though. Hakon Wium Lie (father of CSS and CTO of Opera Software) continues to play hardball, saying the IE8 team's commitment to embrace standards and continue to improve their browser's compliance isn't enough, and mentions again Opera's recent filing to the European Commision regarding that fact. What are they supposed to do, Hakon? Serve cake with every installation? I respect the fact that there's a lot of past woes that Microsoft has to make up for (I get to debug crappy IE6 rendering on a daily basis), but when they make a huge leap in attempting to turn their oversized ship around, why must you berate them before they've had a chance to show what they've done? Let IE8 come out, then start your whining if it fails to accomplish what they're promising.
Hakon isn't without his own woes. Along with IE, Safari, and Firefox, Opera has a new hurdle to leap in the ever-continuing race for standards compliance: the newly released Acid3 test. The third in a series of test pages that only render properly on heavily standards compliant browsers, Acid3 builds on the previous version by testing web features more closely related to "Web 2.0" dynamic applications. I'm glad I'm not a browser maker on days like this, as none of the browsers really do that great of a job with the rendering involved (heck, many of them aren't up to snuff on Acid2 yet).
If you want to see how far your favorite browser has to go, visit the test linked above. I'd save anything you have open in any tabs, though, as I've seen a few browsers crash during the test (amusingly enough, including Opera, which admittedly is flawless with Acid2).