So our norsk friends from Opera have filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft around a week ago.
One of their complaints has been the bundling of Internet Explorer (IE) with the operating system from Redmond.
However they also stated the lack of support for web standards:
The Norwegian company, backed by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a long-time opponent of Microsoft, is asking the EU Commission to force Microsoft to comply with industry standards for web browsers and either unbundle IE from the OS or include other browsers along side IE.
Surprisingly, today the IE development team has announced a pretty astonishing achievement for Internet Explorer 8:
The IE dev team checked in a bunch of code that included several new features implemented in the core rendering engine that enable IE to pass the ACID 2 test!
Microsoft had reported earlier that they felt that passing the test was not important; apparently this has changed. The Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.
As it looks right now the behavior to trigger the correct rendering will be by setting the doctype declaration to “standard” mode, much like can be used today to force IE to use a different rendering path (which triggers different bugs).
Is this sudden commitment to those evil “standards” possibly a response or even an effect to the suit against Microsoft?
Well, with the major browsers now passing the test it at least looks not that bad for web developers in the future. A world with compliant browsers would seriously yield a lot of very nice web applications as the productivity could shift away from the cumbersome cross-browser debugging towards better implementations.
