Opera to Microsoft: You Might Have Mentioned This Before We Made Fools of Ourselves

Well, Opera must be a little red in the face right about now. A week after it complained to the European Commission about Microsoft’s failure to support Web standards, the company said that a preliminary version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser passed Acid2, a test developed by the Web Standards Project to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web standards.

Passed it the day before Opera filed its complaint, too.

“With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing Web,” Internet Explorer GM Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a post to IEBlog. “… We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. … Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, Dec. 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.”

So much for Opera’s saber rattling …