The fate of IE8 and X-UA-Compatible discussed at the round table

IE8 is known to display pages by default in the same way as IE7, and switching to “super standards” mode, in which the browser passes the ACID2 test, will be done using the X-UA-Compatible meta tag X-UA-Compatible . Such a decision excited the web developer community, some of whom supported such a decision, while others strongly rejected it.

Web Standards Project activists met with Microsoft spokesman Chris Wilson to discuss and slightly correct Microsoft’s plans for a new browser version at a round table .

Standardists' proposals were aimed at introducing the default IE8 100% standard using the following measures:

• Microsoft should distribute the patch for IIS, which automatically puts the client browser in IE7 mode (so that the standard IE8 behavior does not disrupt the work of intranets, etc.)
• IE8 should be in 100% standard default mode, out of the box
• IE8 should be a separate browser that can be run in parallel with IE7 so that users can choose which browser to use for which site.

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Wilson's position comes down to his next phrase:

[...] nothing will protect user expirience as much as this is our solution, but we, of course, try to make life easier for web developers

The following conclusions were made:

• Aaron Gustafson suggested that disguising IE8 should be as effective for JavaScript as it is for CSS, which would give Microsoft extra time to grind this part of the browser. For example, document.getElementById always worked on both the id and the name attribute assigned to the tag. Logically, correcting this behavior will ruin thousands of web applications around the world.
• According to Wilson, IE8 beta will allow developers to test their sites for uptime in a new browser. This will provide both developers and Microsoft with an opportunity to assess the scale of the problem caused by standard-compliant IE behavior.
• Most of the problems, as is evident from pre-releases, stem from the browser's identification string. Microsoft is going to disguise it, producing a new version for IE7 even there.

I would like to hope that IE8 beta will give you a good idea of ​​whether application problems are the result of full browser compatibility with standards. According to Wilson, most developers admitted that the problems with their sites in IE7 beta at one time were only beta bugs, not worth the separate effort to fix.