Breaking news! Internet Explorer General Manager, Dean Hachamovitch has posted on the IEBlog to say that IE8 passes the famous Acid2 test.

Acid2 does not guarantee support for any specification, however it does test for support for certain features that are both important to web developers and not yet supported well across the board. According to Wikipedia, the only browsers to pass the test at the moment are:

WebCore-based applications

Safari, the web browser included in Mac OS X

OmniWeb, a web browser for Mac OS X

Shiira, a web browser for Mac OS X

Konqueror, a web browser for Linux

Prince, an XML-to-PDF converter for Windows and Linux

iCab, a web browser for Mac OS and Mac OS X

Presto-based browsers

Opera, a web browser for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD

Internet Channel, a version of the Opera browser for the Nintendo Wii game console.

Gecko-based browsers (1.9 or higher)

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 beta 1

A Good Result and Some Bad Timing

Passing Acid2 represents a fantastic step towards compliance and standards support for the Internet Explorer team, quite a turnaround from the news last week that Opera were taking Microsoft to court over their monopoly in the browser department and their lack of support for standards (which caused some ripples around the rest of the Internet).

It turns out that the IE team are probably the ones laughing now though, since the Acid2 test was passed on 12th December, the day Opera filed their complaint with the European Union. At least, it seems like Molly Holzschlag is excited about it, and so should she be, part of her job is to get the IE team concentrating on standards support. I'd like to congratulate all of them and hope to hear more announcements about IE8 soon, as I'm sure any other developer who has had to deal with incarnations of IE in the past. Standards support in the latest IE won't solve all our problems, but it will go towards making our lives easier in the future.

For now, all I can say is well done IE team and keep up the good work!