IE8, its alive!

Internet Explorer 8 came out today. The office was all a buzz, most of the conversations revolved around its lack of CSS3 support and whether or not it should start in “Standards Mode”. While all of these are valid discussions, they fail to recognize that Microsoft finally did it right for once. They built a browser that supports all current standards.

I was in the CSS3 panel at SXSWi on Sunday afternoon, and there were 3 companies on the panel: Mozilla, Opera, and IE. When the IE guy came up to speak, the first thing he said was, “I am not here to talk about IE and CSS3.” He went on to explain how IE8 had passed every test out there and was fully compliant with CSS2.1. And you know what happened? People applauded. They were friggin elated. I was expecting people to boo this poor guy out of the room. His message was really that IE is in the present now, and because of that, we can all move into the future together.

I think Microsoft is tired of being the whipping boy of the internet and is ready to be open with the web developer community at large, not just those that use their products. One of the major factors in the IE’s inability to move forward was being able to support old products that Microsoft had made in 90s, and I think they finally realized the segment of society still using those products has really shrunk. Oh, and their constantly shrinking market share.

While Microsoft may be moving in the right direction, they haven’t forced everyone to upgrade yet. IE8 is only available via download direcly from the IE website. And for those of you reading this right now who can upgrade, please do so (here). Otherwise, you might be seeing this in your browser the next time you come back.