There’s an interesting post on the MS IEBlog about how Internet Explorer 8 will render in a standards compliant way by default. If you want IE7 rendering you will have to explicitly ask for it in the html document. A List Apart has more on this topic.

Overall I think IE7 was pretty disappointing. I still have a lot of problems getting things to work properly, and I usually get things to work in Firefox and Safari long before I get them to work in IE7, not to mention that some sites that work in IE6, break in IE7. Let’s hope 8 will be different, but now web designers and programmers will have three Internet Explorer browsers to support and deal with, at least for awhile.

Interoperability is the future with more and more clients out there. I believe that hand held browsing will become a major part of many people’s lives in the very near future as WiFi becomes more widespread and cell phone bandwidth prices drop. More and more people will be accessing pages on many different platforms, so web standards and interoperability are more important than ever. Microsoft seems to understand this and is listening to the web standards experts more and more and this is good.