Has Microsoft gone on holiday? It seems so. With their announcement last year of the inclusion of jQuery into the Visual Studio suite and now the imminent release of its latest Internet Explorer (v8). Why the shock? Well, it seems that early beta testing of the new browser is showing it may just have given in to the web standards it has been so sorely criticised for in the past. IE8 is priming up to give as faithful rendering as the current Firefox 3, generally accepted to be the epitome of web standards compliance. This cannot be emphasised enough as good news for all the beleaguered web developers out there who have spent endless days fixing cross-browser issues, primarily with IE.
Of course, the ever increasing market share that Firefox has taken from Microsoft may have something to do with it: recent figures showing a 20% share now going to Firefox[These figures are representative of one particular statistical review, and may not be representative of every web server. Some websites/industries can expect higher concentrations of certain browsers than others], compared with IE7’s “meagre” 46%! Still, that is a huge improvement from 3 years ago when IE held +83% market share.
Where does this leave cross-browser compatibility work – well, it’s going to be some time before the general population converts enough to warrant ignoring IE6+7, so the hard graft will have to be kept up for now. But it appears the end is in sight, at last.