IE8 will be the next version of the infamous web browser software from Microsoft. Why is this such a big deal? Well for a start Microsoft have between 80% - 85% of the browser market share which mean that whatever they do it will have a major impact on the web development community and the way people use the web.
Believe it or not Microsoft used to have close to 98% market share but some how they managed to drop the ball spectacularly. The result of this is that microsoft now have to actually compete with the other browser vendors to prevent their market share slipping even further.
Of course, its universally agreed that IE6 (which is sadly still with us) is a terrible non-standards-compliant mess which is responsible for some of the worst HTML markup known to mankind. IE7 is a little bit better in that regard but still stuggles against Firefox and Safari in virtually all areas. But now Microsoft has promised us vast improvements with IE8, a browser which supports the broken markup of the past whilst promoting almost total standards compliance.
So what do we actually know?
we'll actually not very much, infact Bill Gates recently publically berated the IE team for failing to be as transparent and open as he'd promised they would be.
What we do know is that IE8 does currently pass the ACID2 test which should put it on a par with other common browsers in terms of compliance. ACID2 is a torture test for browsers which makes them jump through rings and do various standards types things which are very technical. IE6 didn't even come close to passing ACID2 and neither did IE7 so this is a major step forward.
If this is the case it means Microsoft are serious about making IE8 standards compliant and that combined with the improvements in IE7 mean that web developers will soon be able to stop doing horrible things to their markup to get their code to render cross-browser. In short it will make our job much easier and we'll be able to focus on being clever and innovative rather than spending horrendous amounts of build time just getting things to work!
Beta on the way
Apparently the first beta of IE8 will be out soon and when it is we'll know a lot more. Until then, we'll just have to keep guessing and keeping our fingers crossed that Microsoft have finally got it right!
