Word coming out of Microsoft is that their early build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 test – the first of their browsers to do so. For those who don’t know what the Acid2 test is, you can read more about it here, but basically it’s a web standards test that will show a giant yellow smiley face if your browser if complaint. This is of particular note because so far Firefox has yet to pass this test – though it has been much closer than IE in the past and is expected to when Gecko version 1.9 is finished (which will be a part of Firefox 3). Opera and Safari have both previously passed the test.

This would seem to be absolutely great news. Internet Explorer has been the bane of web developers and surfers for far too long, and though IE7 was an improvement, a pass of the Acid2 test would seem to indicate that Microsoft is finally taking standards seriously.

One can’t help but be somewhat restrained in their jubilation though given Microsoft’s previous track record and the fact that no one outside of the development team has actually seen IE8 yet. There is also the curious timing issue in that not even a week after Opera sues Microsoft to try to make IE more standards compliant, IE announces they’ve done just that. I guess we’ll have to believe it when we see it.

There is also this statement in the post announcing the test:

The key goal (for the Web Standards Project as well as many other groups and individuals) is interoperability. As a developer, I’d prefer to not have to write the same site multiple times for different browsers. Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work.

With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web.

Which reads suspiciously like “we’re going to kind of be standards compliant again”.

According to their post, we can expect a beta of IE8 sometime in the first half of 2008 – which might mean we may actually see IE8 by the end of next year – which, while still late, would be great.