Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 8 with a significant commitment: it would pass the Acid2 browser compatibility test in its default rendering mode. For web developers who had spent years cursing IE6 and its creative interpretations of CSS standards, this was news worth paying attention to.
The IE6 Legacy
IE6 was a catastrophe for web standards that lasted far longer than it should have. Released in 2001, it shipped with Windows XP and achieved dominant market share. Then Microsoft largely abandoned browser development for years, leaving the web frozen around a browser with broken box model behaviour, no support for transparent PNGs until a hack, and CSS floats that required exorcism to tame.
Every web developer of that era has war stories. Conditional comments. CSS hacks. Testing across multiple IE versions simultaneously. The sheer amount of productive human time destroyed by IE6 compatibility is staggering in retrospect.
What IE8 Promised
Acid2 compliance meant proper CSS rendering, correct handling of transparent PNGs, and a genuine attempt at standards conformance. The IE team blogged extensively about their approach and acknowledged the damage their previous browser had done to the web ecosystem. That acknowledgment was itself remarkable for Microsoft of that era.
IE8 was not the end of the story — IE9, 10, and 11 followed with continued improvements, and eventually Edge replaced IE entirely. But in 2008, the commitment to Acid2 felt like a genuine turning point. The devil, it appeared, was trying to reform.