Peter Vatistas

“One issue we heard repeatedly during the IE7 beta concerned sites that looked fine in IE6 but looked bad in IE7. The reason was that the sites had worked around IE6 issues with content that – when viewed with IE7’s improved Standards mode – looked bad.

As we started work on IE8, we thought that the same thing would happen in the short term: when a site hands IE8 content and asks for Standards mode, that content would expect IE7’s Standards mode and not appear or function correctly.

In other words, the technical challenge here is how can IE determine whether a site’s content expects IE8’s Standards mode or IE7’s Standards mode? Given how many sites offer IE very different content today, which should IE8 default to?

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).”

I think it is about time the Internet Explorer team over at Microsoft is listening, Mozilla has been listening for years. I still prefer Firefox over IE for two simple reasons:

1. Add-ons. Mozilla’s Firefox has a very strong following and there are a ton of awesome add-ons available.

2. Security. I’ve never had one issue with security using Mozilla Firefox. One of my websites was hacked some months ago and BS javascript was added. I never noticed it nor had any issues because I was using Firefox 2. One day I decided to check how my site looked in IE7 and WHAM - pop-ups, browser crashes, and a few new programs were installed on my computer (not to mention all the stupid viruses).

I am kind of excited to see what Microsoft pulls out of their hats on IE8 - they always seem to surprise me.

Read more here.