Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft's most standards compliant browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and plumped for standard-by-default. The first beta of IE8 was released in March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and workarounds to get pages working properly. IE8 should make things a lot better—but it will still fall far short of the standards set by Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.

Microsoft was initially concerned that defaulting to standards compliance mode would "break the web"—that is, make a significant proportion of web pages render so badly as to be unusable—and experiences with beta 1 have provided some justification for the company's concerns. Microsoft is appealing to web developers to fix their web pages, but the unfortunate reality is that the owners of many websites will be unwilling to foot the bill for those fixes to be made.

To mitigate this difficulty, Microsoft is adding a new feature to aid the transition. Web developers will be able to add a tag to their page (or their web server) to force pages to render in the same manner as IE7. Pages without the tag will continue to use the "doctype switch" to choose between the old, nonstandard "quirks mode" and the new "standards mode"; pages with the new tag will still use the doctype switch, but this time to choose between "quirks mode" and "IE 7 mode." The tag will be supported in beta 2 of IE8 (due in August), and is also available to IE 8 beta 1 with the latest security update.

With this tag, Microsoft is hoping that developers will have a low-cost way of making their pages work once IE8 ships, while still allowing standards mode to be the default going forward. The response from developers, however, has been lukewarm. Many commenters on the Internet Explorer blog have stated that they are happy to do the work to make their page's standards compliant; the problem is that Microsoft has not disclosed which parts of which standards it will support, nor which bugs will be fixed.

The ultimate reason for these problems with standards mode is that IE7's standards mode was both buggy and nonstandard. Developers wrote IE7-specific workarounds to ensure that pages worked in both reasonably standards-conforming browsers (such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox) and IE7. Without telling developers what to expect for IE8, the same problem is liable to occur with that, too; instead of targeting the standards, pages will contain workarounds and hacks to avoid IE8-specific problems.

Taking clues from Apple and Mozilla

To really tackle this problem, Microsoft will need to be a lot more open about its plans for the browser and offer updates far more frequently. Both WebKit (the rendering engine of Safari) and Firefox offer nightly builds, and even the commercial Opera browser has weekly builds available. These regular releases make it much quicker for bug fixes to get into developers' hands, making it easier for them to update their sites now rather than having to wait months between betas.

Greater transparency about what is and is not supported is also needed; for example, although Firefox 3, due for release any day now, will not have complete support for SVG, we can see exactly which bits it does support. Internet Explorer has no equivalent documentation, with the result that developers are operating in the dark. Although in the case of SVG, IE is "easy"—it has no support for any of the specification—in areas such as CSS and HTML, IE does offer partial support.

Microsoft has made steps in the right direction; the IE blog is giving more insight into the browser's development than it used to, and developments such as the CSS 2.1 test suite are a useful benchmark for all browsers. But the standard has been set by the open source browsers, and so this is the level of openness and transparency that MS should be striving for, even if it finds that this sits uncomfortably with its commercial nature.

Internet Explorer is hemorrhaging market share, thanks to its virtual abandonment between about 2001 and 2006 and the rapid progress by competing browsers. To stop losing ground to Firefox and Safari, Internet Explorer needs to stand head and shoulders above both of them. But with Microsoft's lack of clear objectives, infrequent releases, and poor communication, IE8 will be struggling to even achieve parity with its competitors.