I was very skeptical back in December 2007 when Microsoft released a PNG image indicating that an internal build of IE8 passed the Acid2 test (Acid Tests are complex pieces of coding which test the standards compliance of any browser). And I said:
Everyone’s just so optimistic for IE to be standards-compliant that they’ve disregarded Microsoft’s capacity and history of lying.
Guess what? Now that there’s a beta of Internet Explorer to be downloaded, which Microsoft claims features “improved interoperability and compatibility”, I can entirely disprove the previous claim that IE8 passed the Acid2 test. (Note: it doesn’t take much to pass Acid2; current versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and other browsers pass it easily.)
This is what Acid2 looks like on IE8 (top) and the reference rendering (bottom):
It’s plainly obvious that Internet Explorer is incompetent at displaying even the relatively basic Acid2 test.
Let’s examine what happens with Internet Explorer 8 and Acid3. Once again, IE8’s screenshot is on the top and the reference rendering is on the bottom.
Big difference, eh?
There. I’ve completely and utterly debunked the false claims that IE8 passes the Acid2 test. Once again, it’s the people creating the product who spread misleading information specifically to promote their product.
For all the web developers and designers out there: DON’T take advantage of IE8’s new proprietary features; urge Microsoft to support web standards, which they have embarrassingly FAILED to do for more than the past decade.
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They say that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 test, a CSS-compatibility testing page from the Web Standards Project, but I question it: is it necessarily so?
It ain’t necessarily so…
The one screenshot we have seen “verifying” this claim is the following PNG image from Microsoft itself:
and I see no third-party verification of this claim. Everyone’s just so optimistic for IE to be standards-compliant that they’ve disregarded Microsoft’s capacity and history of lying. (Example: anti-trust lawsuit of late 1990’s.)
Maybe, just maybe, they’re saying this way ahead of time to generate some hype for their yet non-released product. Maybe, just maybe, the image they’ve published was created or modified on some image-editing program — Photoshop? Maybe, just maybe, they’ve created a basic HTML page that uses the reference rendering that is guaranteed to display properly on ANY modern browser!!!
I’d hate to be like that John C. Dvorak guy from Tech5, but I have to be suspicious of this claim. It’s wild… we see no evidence other than a clearly modified (cropped) screenshot and some words from a guy being paid to work for a monopoly that will do no good to maintain that position (example: compliance with the raised middle finger).
All in all… just be careful when you see news that is too good to be true.
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