In case you hadn’t already heard, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer development team have announced yesterday that the upcoming release of Internet Explorer – IE8 – will run in standards compliant mode.

This is fantastic news for web designers everywhere and marks a milestone for the IE development team: they’re listening to feedback from the developer community!

Background

When Microsoft revealed plans for IE8 they clarified that web designers and developers would need to explicitly “opt-in” to IE8’s standards mode for rendering their websites. Without opting-in, IE8 would revert and actually use the broken standards rendering engine of IE7.

It instantly struck us as a very backwards thing to do.

In an effort to demonstrate my meaning, I’m going to use a slightly tongue in cheek example: Imagine you bought a new computer which came with the latest version of Windows – Vista – installed on it. You turn it on and wonder why it doesn’t look the way you thought it should. After a bit of digging around you find out that your new computer actually runs Windows XP by default, unless you specifically opt-in and turn on Windows Vista. In theory you’d be pretty miffed¹. Well this is how IE8 was being proposed.

A stunned web design community

It looks like this announcement has taken the breath out of standards-aware web designers around the world. Our favourite standardista, Roger Johansson, had has called it “Surprise of the year”:

I had to rub my eyes and look again. Was I still asleep and dreaming? But no, I was awake, and what I saw reported from multiple sources is that Microsoft has reversed its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested….No, I’m not making this up.

Ars Technica certainly weren’t expecting it either:

Although I’m glad to see the change (I understood why they wanted to have the opt-in behavior, but I didn’t agree with it), it’s not entirely clear why the company has changed its stance. The arguments that were made at the time of the original announcement were not unexpected or surprising; Microsoft knew what the criticisms would be and attempted to justify its choice in spite of them. Nothing has really changed between now and then, and Microsoft’s argument for the opt-in behavior is just as strong now as it was six weeks ago.

A lot of the comments on the IE8 developer blog are full of thanks and relief, and there are excellent comments on Roger Johansson’s blog. However, I think one of my favourite reactions to the announcement has come from a comment on Ajaxian:

“While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.”
Ummm… the cynic in me thinks that $1.6 Billions in fines have given MS a whole new appreciation for standards…

A change is as good as a break

So the cynic above beggars the question – why the sudden change?

Overall we’d like to believe that the primary motivator was that standards-aware developers around the world had made their opinions heard loud and clear and the IE8 team decided to listen, we’d like to believe this was all a part of their forward-thinking “Interoperability Principles” (which is really just MS being forced into behaving properly). Realistically, as the Ajaxian commenter pointed out, there are some other factors that might have motivated this choice.

Opera recently launched an anti-trust case in the European Union, which stated that Microsoft’s unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain, and technologically inferior and that can even expose users to security risks. They are looking for the Commission to take the necessary actions to compel Microsoft to give consumers a real choice and to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer.

Given Microsoft’s extremely drawn out and expensive dealings with the European Court, there is a good chance that the giant has learnt from some powerful slaps to the wrists and is finally realising that the easier route might actually be to interoperate with the competition.

What is the true nature of these changes, will they will last and are Microsoft actually becoming more open? Are they actually putting up a smoke screen of openness as part of a new marketing strategy which will allow them to push forth their own standards and continue to dominate. Instead of answering these questions, we’ll just point you at www.noooxml.org² and state that we’re stunned and delighted that IE8 has taken this step, and we look forward to a future of web design that might be a little less confusing and complicated.

Roll on the day that we can, in good conscience, drop support for the cracked, ageing, and fundamentally flawed IE6. For yea, it is the bane of our lives.

1. I say in theory due to the fact that as we’ve stated before, Windows Vista has some problems, and from the sounds of things, most people would be quite happy to have the option to choose between XP and Vista
2. Nooxml.org is a website which is firmly against Microsoft’s latest standards approach with regard to office documents