So … Microsoft would like you to believe that their latest re-draft of the Internet Explorer joke (which is getting very old indeed) now has a new, improved punchline … about the only thing that they can guarantee you, is that you’ll laugh twice as much as ever before. I mean come on – how can a company that has done so much for the personal computer (market?) get it so wrong so consistently?

Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 8 is faster, easier and safer than any of the previous incarnations (unfortunately IE just won’t die … leave alone stay dead) and go on trying to convince us that they now have the superior browser … or at least one that can go ten rounds with any of their opposition, blow by blow – which is true in part, seeing that it still blows big time. You can read the full, official release here.

Now, for the moment, let us forget about all the hogwash they’re spewing about IE8 reigning supreme over other browsers based on security, privacy, ease of use, blah-blah – it’s all one big lie anyway. Most of these “facts” are based on opinion and preference anyway, with no instrument/means by which we can measure these claims. The only useful tools that they do offer us are the developer tools (pretty useful for fixing IE specific lay-out bugs), but then Firefox has the inimitable Firebug in its camp.

What about the Web Standards claim?

As a developer/web designer, my biggest concern is with web standards – something that they claim to have down pat at present. I much prefer facts and statistics over hype, so I figured a quick reality check in the form of the Acid Test should be just the ticket. For those who are not familiar with the Acid Test – it is a Web Standards Project initiative that puts your browser through its paces and then weighs its performance against the W3C guidelines for markup. In plain English then: it checks if your browser will display all websites as specified and gives it a score out of 100, depending on its performance.

So, without further a-do … the test results:

• Safari 4 – 100/100
• Google Chrome – 99/100
• Firefox 3.5 – 93/100
• Firefox 3 – 71/100
• IE 8 – 20/100
• IE 7 – 12/100
• IE 6 – 11/100

So … while it is indeed true that IE8 is a vast improvement over its predecessor, it has a long way to go before we really see the results of Microsoft having “invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification”. While they now claim to offer us crash recovery, I can only imagine that this feature was included simply because it really needs to recover from crashes frequently … that has been my experience in the short while that I have been testing the official release.

It is not all doom and gloom though and I think we have to accept that it’s early days for this new approach from Microsoft. Acid Test aside, I have found that CSS-techniques generally work well since IE7 (albeit after some recent Windows updates), without the need for hacks or IE-specific stylesheets.

For now Internet Explorer is still a #FAIL in my books and I think that, with IE8 finally released, it is really time that Microsoft lays IE6 to rest … here’s hoping.