Ok, I’ll admit it, as an avid Firefox user I have been the first to stick the boot into Internet Explorer in a question of standards. This level of arrogance is almost expected of me as a developer, which is why I was so surprised to find that Microsoft’s up and coming offering, IE8 is making some huge steps towards standards compliance among other things.

Sure, as I have been browsing around the internet this week I have come across a lot of pages that are broken in IE8, I expected this and thankfully so did Microsoft and with one click of the new “Compatibility View” button the pages were rendering correctly.

That’s not the only reason IE8 impressed me though, the page rendering is much faster than its predecessor, the interface is much tighter and as a whole, client side scripts seem to be much improved.

I don’t think I’ll be jumping the good ship Mozilla just yet though, there are still some large issues that must be addressed (in my opinion) before IE8 is let loose. The new accelerators, while a solid idea, fall short of useful, often getting in the way of what I really wanted to do. Similarly, the developer tools, while being an extensive resource of information, are far too slow and end up feeling more like an obstacle course on the route to knowledge.

All in all I feel that Microsoft are now paving the way to redeeming their reputation on the world wide web, in the browser stakes at least and who knows, if adoption of IE8 is good, maybe we can finally forget the thorn in every developers side that is IE6.

Here’s hoping!