One of my previous posts mentioned that IE8 would default to IE7 standards mode unless web developers would specifically request the new IE8 mode. Well, there’s some good news coming from Redmond.

The IE team announced that they changed the behaviour. IE8 will now use its most standard compliant rendering mode for pages that meet the criteria for standards mode. If you, as web developer, want pages to be rendered using IE7′s standards mode you will have to use the META tag or the corresponding HTTP header. So they did the right thing and made this feature an opt-in feature: you only have to act if you want to use this feature.

I’m glad Microsoft listened to the web developer community and did the right thing. This puts the burden on the developers who don’t want to fix their pages and it might persuade them to update their code if it’s broken in a new IE version.

In other IE8 news, Beta 1 of Microsoft’s newest browser is now available. This is only intended for web developers and designers. If you are a regular user, you should skip this release.