Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 today, and I’m a lot more pleased to be writing this than I would’ve thought two years ago. IE 7 was a significant improvement over IE 6’s miserable standards support, but as Ars Technica puts it, it was still a catch-up release, and IE 8 is a genuine attempt to compete with the new crop of browsers that have come up since IE 7 was released:

what really needs to be emphasized here is that IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game. IE7 was a catch-up release, there’s no question about that. However, with IE8, which is bigger leap from IE7 than IE7 was from IE6, Microsoft is pulling out the big guns and offering features which other browsers have yet to adopt. It’s good to see Microsoft fight back with a vengeance, but the company has more competition than ever before, from the likes of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

At SxSW interactive last week, the Microsoft panelist in the talk on CSS 3 mentioned that IE 8 is more compliant with Acid2 than any other browser out there. Apparently, Acid 3 support is still pretty crappy, which is kind of annoying since Acid3 support isn’t that great yet in any browser with significant market share. One would assume that support for Acid3 in IE 8 would drive more rapid adoption of the cool stuff you can do with the standards tested by Acid3, but it’s apparently not part of their plans for the browser. As far as I’m concerned, this is yet more BrowserFail from MS – W3C standards should be followed by any browser. If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple (and therefore Google’s Chrome) can see this, why the hell can’t Microsoft?

Still, as someone who has to get cross-browser support going for IE, I’m happy to see the improvements that version 8 brings. And if I were inclined to ever use a Windows PC, I’d probably be pretty excited about this feature:

A Web Slice grabs specific information from a website (like the top stories from Digg or the weather forecast) and puts it in a drop-down menu, eliminating the need to browse to the actual website. “It’s about making it as easy for sites to extend and blur into the browser,” Hachamovitch told Ars. This is a brilliant feature but it is completely lost if developers ignore it.

This certainly sounds more interesting than the hideous RSS reader thing in Safari, and of a similar but more flexible functionality. Good to see MS doing this kind of stuff, but I agree with the assessment from Ars that unless devs support it, it’ll be useless. And given devs’ well-known affinity (sarcasm) for doing IE-specific work, I’m not seeing this being as big as it should be, given the quality of the innovation.