chedstone.com

According to ActiveWin.com, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent out invitations to testers to test the lastest beta of the Internet Explorer 8 software.  I haven’t heard much about the next version of IE lately, so it grabbed my attention, and also started to make me worry.

I do web design for a local real estate company in town and can attest to the fact that creating cross browser compatible websites can sometimes be a bitch. Strike that, when IE 6 and 7 are involved, it’s always a bitch. And of course these browsers will be involved, they’re the most popular browsers on the Internet. Some 80 percent of our traffic comes from Internet Explorer based browsers.

A stunning portion of our user base hasn’t even upgraded their browsers to IE 7 and are still attached to IE6. I hope Microsoft has a good marketing plan on deploying IE8 and getting users to upgrade. Otherwise it will be coding for 4 browsers. Making sure things run smoothly in IE 6, 7, 8 and Firefox. Not to mention the .5 percent that run Webkit based browsers like Safari.

Things do sound hopeful, however. The Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog reported that IE8 was able to render the Acid2 browser test without a hitch. The acid 2 test is a standards compliance test that, when ran on a fully standards compliant browser, renders a funny looking yellow face perfectly.

Internet Explorer 8…please don’t break the web!