The Microsoft Internet Explorer Product Team announced on Wednesday that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has successfully passed the Web Standard Project Acid2 rendering test, thereby completing a feature that many have demanded – even to the point of lawsuits.
In the announcement, General Manager Dean Hachamovitch describes the team’s communication strategy.
For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.
However is this the best strategy? How confident should Microsoft be that a feature will be supported before announcing it? Could much of the frustration evident in the comments to Hachamovitch’s post of December 8th in which people were basically demanding to know what Microsoft was up to have been avoided if a few months ago Hachamovitch simply posted: “we are working hard on making IE8 pass Acid2”?
The post states that more details of IE8 will be released in the MIX08 developer conference in March in Las Vegas and a beta will be released in the first half of 2008.