salt and lemon, with a pinch of css

Microsoft has announced its decision to ship IE8 in standards mode.

Aaron Gustafson created great controversy on his A List Apart article ‘Beyond the Doctype: web standards, forward compatibility, and IE8′, which led to hundreds of comments against the idea that a meta tag should be used to render IE8 in the new standards mode:

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

I think MS realised the huge implications for business the new change was going to make. For now we can relax and wait for the inevitable problems ahead that IE8 will bring.

As front-end web developers, we are always trying to build web pages that are going to be rendered fast enough by browsers. But there is much more to it than simply clean code and small images.

Yahoo’s Steve Souders presents some rules on how to improve the performance of websites in this video. You can also read 13 rules for speeding up your website.

As if we didn’t have enough browsers already…

Apple has released a beta version of Safari 3 for Windows users. It’s a good looking browser, but does it work? Eric Meyer has some doubts. Although I was pleased to see that none of my websites were broken!

This week we also saw the release of Netscape 9 and Camino (for the Mac).

Bonus link: More on browser support