Alcides Fonseca

Well, tomorrow in MIX08 keynote, Dean is going to talk about IE8 and even show it (rumors say at this time there is already a private beta program running).

The IE8 team (and some other guys at MS) noticed that the webdesigners and developers didn’t particularly like the IE8 behavior towards standards, and with MIX coming up, they definitely want to please designers, so yesterday they changed their minds and IE8 will follow the standards rendering the pages for default. This is a huge news! When everybody says that Apple listen to their users (regarding 10.5.2), Microsoft does the same about their ever-hated browser.

There is also one thing I guess their going to announce tomorrow: the fact IE8 will ship with the silverlight plugin. Everyone is expecting this, but it’s their way of convincing more designers to enter the silverlight wave. And Apple will also announce the same for Safari in next mac event…

After yesterday’s announcement, I’m already please with Microsoft, but there are a few things that would make me even more happier. First it would be the Microformats UI. After Mozilla dropping microformat UI support for Firefox3, this would be an excellent news to higher IE in people’s consideration.

Another news I would love to see is the OpenID support. Right now, I get the feeling Microsoft is becoming a security freak. They already have Cardspace support, but for regular internet surfers, they will only use it, if attached to an OpenID. So we could expect a Cardspace+OpenID support, but I guess not now.

The final feature, and this one would be the one I would really fall in love with MS, but I know it’s impossible, is the HTML5 (even if partial) rendering support. There are already a few folks wearing html5, so it would help people to move forward, and even pressure the standardization process.