The Internet Explorer team, currently working on Internet Explorer 8, have announced that they can now render the Acid2 test correctly.

The Acid 2 test is far from a complete standards compliance test, but more an indicator of a browser's level of CSS support. If anything, perhaps this is a sign that the IE team are getting serious about web standards. The Acid 2 test is already passed by Opera and Safari, and the current Firefox 3 BETA release also passes it. Since Firefox 3 will almost certainly be out before IE8, that means Microsoft are still the last of the major browsers to arrive at the Acid 2 party.

Of course, how much better IE8 will really be for web developers waits to be seen. Since we still have to put up with the quirks of previous versions, which will take a long time to go away, then we're going to be coding around IE bugs for a few years yet. Also, a note: it only passes the Acid 2 test when in "standards mode", activated by putting a doctype in. That's considered good practice now anyway, though.