IE8 passes acid test, but IE6 still roams free
The IE team announced that IE8 now passes the acid test. As awesome as this is, and as much as I would love to praise the IE guys for finally taking web standards seriously, there is a bigger problem out there…
And that is the problem of un-upgraded users clinging to a browser almost 7 years old. Distributing IE7 through auto-update was good, but it didn’t solve the problem of IE6 still being out there and spreading its evil far and wide. And it’s not getting better quickly enough.
As long as IE6 roams free, web developers will continue hate microsoft…no matter how good new products are…or however enlightened their new attitudes about web standards
Good luck to the IE8 team and I hope the attitude of following web standards continues forward. But Microsoft is going to have to make some radical moves like forcing people to upgrade or we’re going to end up with 3 versions of the browser in the wild, making the new browser a much bigger problem than the problems it already solves. Nobody wants 3 css hacks where there are already 2.
On a final note, I leave you with this gem from the IEBlog posting:
“Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards”
(emphasis mine). My doublespeak meter just went through the roof.
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