I’m not a blind Microsoft-bash­er, nei­ther am I an MS fan­boy (in fact, I think the whole idea of align­ing your­self with any sin­gle tech­nol­o­gy or brand is pret­ty nar­row-mind­ed). I think MS do some things well, and some things poor­ly. I am going to have a bit of a pop at them at the end of this arti­cle, but I’m going to start by defend­ing them.

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After two days of com­mo­tion regard­ing the Inter­net Explor­er team’s deci­sion to include a stan­dards opt-in in the next ver­sion of their brows­er, Mozil­la’s John Resig has noticed some­thing rather impor­tant in an exchange on IE’s Chris Wilson’s blog; name­ly:

Inter­net Explor­er 8 will sup­port DOCTYPE switch­ing for new DOC­TYPEs (like HTML5).

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Pre­dictably, yes­ter­day’s announce­ment from Microsoft about the new stan­dards opt-in switch has cre­at­ed quite a stir in the web devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty. As I not­ed yes­ter­day, the reac­tion from the oth­er brows­er mak­ers would be quite impor­tant — and it looks as if they’re not interested.

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The Inter­net Explor­er team announced today that we will have to opt in to using the improved stan­dards sup­port in future ver­sions of their brows­er, by means of a meta dec­la­ra­tion in the head of our documents:

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

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It looks like Microsoft are giv­ing a big push to get users of IE6 upgrad­ed to IE7; the brows­er is includ­ed in the lat­est Auto­mat­ic Update, and when open­ing IE6 this morn­ing I was auto­mat­i­cal­ly redi­rect­ed to a splash page pro­mot­ing IE7 and encour­ag­ing me to down­load it. I won­der what effect this will have on mar­ket share fig­ures (if any). Although I think this should have been done soon­er, I applaud Microsoft for the effort; IE7 is far from per­fect, but it’s bet­ter than IE6.

After com­plaints from the web com­mu­ni­ty about lack of trans­paren­cy in the devel­op­ment of the next Inter­net Explor­er, and a lit­tle brow­beat­ing from Mol­ly Holzschlag, Bill Gates says there is no “deep secret” about what they’re doing with IE, and the IE team have respond­ed by releas­ing the detail we’ve all been wait­ing for: the brows­er after IE7 will be IE8.

Thanks.