When it was revealed that IE 8 is indeed in the making a couple of months ago, the news of the day was the improvements Microsoft has made to IE regarding standard compliance.

Theoretically, things were going great: Microsoft passed the ACID 2 test demonstrating quite a big step up from the IE 7. For years Microsoft has been catching up with the Web standards, but the pace of the progress has been slow. Each new version of IE after and including version 6 was just a bit more compliant. Passing ACID test was supposed to demonstrate that IE 8 will in fact be sufficiently standards compliant so that Web developers can finally code once, deploy everywhere (for more on the different modes of browser behavior see Wikipedia page on “quirks mode”.)

Or so it seemed. The problem at the time of the original IE 8 announcement was the way the standard behavior of the browser was supposed to be triggered. Due to the large number of Web sites that still target broken “standards” mode of older IE versions, Microsoft decided to introduce a new meta tag with which a developer would opt-in to the “really really standards mode”. Thus, by default, the IE 8 would behave the same as IE 7, which in a way defeats the purpose of the real standards mode and would most likely slow down the adoption of the standard compliant pages.

The decision to go with the IE 7 standards mode by default resulted in a huge backlash from developers. Basically by doing this Microsoft introduced yet another special case that a web developer has to think about. If the IE 8 was in the standards compliant mode by default and judging by the level of the standards compliance of both Safari 3 and Firefox 3 it looked like web developers could finally stop conditionally styling the pages, which is a huge win for everyone.

Then a great thing happened. During this years’ MIX conference Microsoft announced that IE 8 will in fact by default do things the right way. If a developer wanted to get a IE 7 “standards” mode it had to explicitly say via a meta tag, so the situation is a reverse of what it used to be. To rectify the cases where a developer didn’t say anything, the web site was targeting IE 7 and therefore looked bad in IE 8, Microsoft added an “Emulate IE7” button featured very prominently in the main toolbar.

We can only speculate what motivated Microsoft to make such a change. Some think that increased pressure from various lawsuits in Europe and particularly complaints by Opera about the need for Microsoft to increase IE’s standard compliance was a main driver. Some think that it was simply a part of the overall Microsoft strategy to open up. Some think Microsoft actually listened to customer feedback.

Whatever it is I am grateful. Even though I do not do much Web work, what I did do was often an exercise in pain trying to align the look & feel across major browsers.

Here’s to hoping that by the end of this year one will have very reasonable standards support across all major browsers  and that the compatibility nightmare will finally be over.