Internet Explorer 8
I’d just like to congratulate the Internet Explorer development team — according to the latest post on the IEBlog, IE8 passes the ACID2 test, when rendering in standards compliant mode.
Anyone without a geeky interest in css rendering probably won’t have heard of ACID2, but it’s a test (not a standard) that was put forward by the Web Standards Project to help assess compliance against the W3C CSS standard.
Previous versions of Internet Explorer have never come even close; indeed my personal browser of choice (whatever version of Firefox I’m currently on) fails it. The IE team deserve massive, massive credit for this level of achievement — if this level of standards compliance is matched across the board in the release version (even only in “standards mode”) then Internet Explorer will have gone from having been one of the worst browsers in terms of standards compliance to being up there with the best.
And that’s a mighty achievement, which would somewhat offset Opera’s complaint to the EU about Microsoft. But that’s another story (the previous one, in fact).
For now, I’d just like to say a big well done to Chris Wilson and the IE team. But obviously if the standards have all gone off to cack when the release version comes out, I’ll take it all back…
Hello. I am 
Unless my sources are wrong, Firefox test-versions have passed the Acid 2 test for nearly a year. I think Firefox 3beta passed the last time I looked, but right now the test itself seems to be corrupted so it doesn’t even work in Opera.
If IE8 actually ends up supporting a wide range of W3C standards, then everything is fine - with that version. Will take a while before we can forget previous IE-versions though, so nothing much will change for the next few years.
Now we can expect a long wait, before seeing what IE8 is all about.
Yep, shame we’ll be waiting quite a while before this makes any difference, and by which time, they’ll be new versions of [x]HTML and CSS to contend with… But you’re totally right, Jack, to congratulate the IE team where it due!