Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that the newest version of their web browser, Internet Explorer 8, which will apparently successfully pass the Acid2 test. What is this test? This test is considered to be the industry standard, with Opera and Safari passing it long ago, and Firefox recently passing the test as well.

I purposely waited to write this post in order to kind of gauge interest in this announcement.  Internet Explorer has taken some major hits over the past year and even the United States government has recommended people switch to Firefox for safety reasons.  Since this post was published by the Internet Explorer team, I was surprised to see countless posts singing the IE8 teams praises and talking about how excited they are to switch back to using Internet Explorer once 8.0 is released.

In my personal opinion, I think the fact that it took the leading web browser team the longest of the major browsers to build a compliant web browser with todays web standards shows a lot about their dedication to their users. They have a lot more resources than Opera, Safari, and in some ways even than Firefox, yet it took them way to long.  I personally will not be singing their praises, as that would be like praising someone for not going to jail in my opinion. Building a standards compliant browser is what they are supposed to do, and it took them to long for me to give them my respect.

Are you excited about Internet Explorer 8?  It looks like the first beta is scheduled to be available in the first half of 2008, so it will be interesting to see what direction Microsoft goes with their browser to try to compete with Firefox and Opera.