So I've been noticing a buzz in the web dev community lately about a web browser called "WebKit. " It made some news recently when it tied with Opera as being one of the first browsers to pass the Acid 3 test.

Don't get too excited, it's just an open source version of Safari. Well, it's the rendering engine that Safari is built off of, which is apparently based on the same engine that's used by Konqueror. (Now there's a browser we haven't heard of in a while.) It seems that in order to "install" WebKit you basically have to run a script that uses an existing Safari install as its user interface. The install seems to be temporary.

Running Web Kit

1. If you don't already have it installed, then download Safari and install it.
   
2. After it's installed check out the Acid 3 test, and you'll see that Safari fails it (as of 4/24/2008).
   
3. Download the latest build of WebKit.
4. Extract the zip to your desktop.
5. Double click the run-nightly-webkit.cmd script. The old MS-DOS console will open and will spit out a series of file updates.
   
6. Safari will automatically launch, and even though it says it's Safari it's actually WebKit. Navigate to the Acid 3 test and you'll see that it passes it. Note that your original Safari install is unaffected.

Download IE8 Beta 1!

Perhaps the most incredible news came Monday when it was announced that the default rendering mode for IE8 will NOT be the legacy engine, but the web standards engine. This is great news for those of us who want the web to move toward interoperability.

I'll be honest, I didn't believe Microsoft when they claimed that web standards was going to be the default rendering mode. (I mean, I just watched a video a few weeks ago about how Microsoft doesn't want to break backward compatiblity.) So I installed IE8 Beta 1 and went straight to the Acid 2 test—and to my surprise it worked.

Now the new meta tag I mentioned has not been disgarded. Rather than rendering with the old engine by default, and using the meta tag to force "standards mode," Microsoft has opted to render in "standards mode" by default and using the meta tag to force IE8 to use the old rendering engine. In other words, if your site breaks in IE8 you'll need to add the new meta tag to it, or upgrade your site to follow web standards.

Needless to say, I could not be happier with their decision. If IE8 launches to the public as expected, then web standards should finally be the standard within a few years of the release date.

Developer Tools

The new "Developer Tools" seem to be a fusion of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and Firebug. One of the first things I noticed after installing IE8 was that the Developer Toolbar no longer works because it's been replaced by Developer Tools. It's a shame because there are many useful features of the Developer Toolbar that are currently absent from the new Developer Tools. If you need the toolbar to do your job then I'd recommend not installing IE8 Beta 1 until the Developer Tools have matured.

Anyone who's familiar with Firebugs' CSS tracing capabilities will probably be disappointed with the Beta 1 offering from Developer Tools. Unlike Firebug and the Developer Toolbar, you can not manipulate CSS on the fly. However, I liked Microsoft's new JavaScript debugger better than Firebug's debugger. What's been missing until now is a good, free JavaScript debugger for IE that's quick to open and easy to use. If you're familiar with Visual Studio's debugger you'll have no trouble figuring out the new JavaScript debugger. I was using it within seconds, whereas Firebug had took some experimenting to get used to.

For more information on IE8 check out the new Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit.

Conclusion 

If you're a web developer IE8 is definately something to be excited about. However, I uninstalled IE8 and went back to using IE7, the Web Developer Toolbar, and MultipleIEs. The lack of CSS manipulation capabilities in IE8 was disrupting the speed of a project that I am working on. Hopefully, Beta 2 will have better CSS support in the Developer Tools.

Oh Lord!

Remember those DOCTYPE tags that were supposed to tell the browser how to render the content of the page? Well, they've pretty much lost their meaning. Why?

1. Developers were using DOCTYPE tags for years without understanding their purpose.
2. Internet Explorer was ignoring the web-standards behind the DOCTYPE.
3. Developers only tested their pages in IE, possibly before the popularity of Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.

In a nutshell, it was the developer's ignorance combined with Microsoft's lack of interest in updating Internet Explorer after version 6.0. (Microsoft released IE 1.0 to IE 6.0 in six years, but IE 6.0 to IE 7.0 took more than five years!)

The result? The inability to move Internet Explorer to web-standards without breaking all those sites that suffer from the aforementioned problems. Microsoft is very afraid of "breaking the web," as they say. A lot of people were angry when their pages didn't render "correctly" in IE7, though the browser was trying to rendering their page according to the DOCTYPE they were using, which was basically ignored in the old versions of IE.

Now things are supposed to be getting better. IE8 now passes the Acid 2 test, which is a great step forward for the Microsoft team, but we have to explicitly tell IE to render in standards mode using a new meta tag. If we fail to use this tag IE will still use the old rendering engine from yesteryears.

The New Meta Tag

The meta tag tells the browser which browser version the page was originally designed for.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

In this case, the meta tag says the page was designed for IE8.

However, what frustrates many of us is that IE's default rendering behavior is still going to be the old one. This means that people who don't necessarily know what they're doing are still going to be designing pages for the old rendering engine—indefinately. I find that the world's most commonly-used browser is "opt-in" for web-standards is a little troubling, but it's the only sure way for IE to stay backwards compatible.

It's a little progress at a cost, I guess.

All I know is that I'll still be supporting IE6 and IE7 until their marketshare falls into negligible numbers, which doesn't look to be anytime soon. The one-design-fits-all dream is slightly closer, but still so far away. In the mean time I'm going to start making space on my sites for a new meta tag.