This article gives us a peak at some features in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. There are some new features such as Web Slices which look great, but the most exciting bit of news is Microsoft’s new commitment to web standards.
Web developers for years have griped about this. Typically the development process started by building the site to web standards to allow it to work in browsers like Firefox and Safari. Next, developers would tweak the design by creating separate CSS files that allowed the site to display correctly in IE. With IE 8 this additional step will finally and hopefully go completely away.
I am happy with Microsoft’s overall commitment to web standards and platform independence. They demonstrated this with Silverlight, which is committed to platform independent functionality.
“Web developers spend so much time tweaking their code to get it to look the same in Firefox as it does in Internet Explorer,” said Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at The NPD Group. “These guys are jumping up for joy.”