After reading Joel Spolsky’s excellent article regarding Internet Explorer 8 and its relation to web standards, a though occurred to me.
To summarise the article: Internet Explorer 8 is in a very annoying position. Even though its rendering engine is a lot better than its IE7 equivalent, many sites (standards-compliant ones no less) fail to render correctly because of countless Internet Explorer-specific hacks.
The alternative solution, which is to let Internet Explorer 8 render web sites using the IE7 engine by default, and only use the IE8 engine when explicitly requested, caused a storm of protest.
If Internet Explorer 8’s rendering engine really is that much better, why not get rid of IE’s legacy and start over, with a fresh name (and a fresh user agent string)?
Internet Explorer 8 would simply be like a brand new standards-compliant browser. IE-specific hacks wouldn’t work, and the new name would be like a blank slate to start from. Doesn’t that sound cool?
Of course, it’s not like any Microsoft employees are reading this web log. Is this a stupid suggestion? Probably. Who am I kidding anyway?