Testing IE8 Beta: Like Ohio, we expected better from you

IE8 Beta went public today, and I'm running it through Meyerweb's CSS2 test suite. Unlike IE7, which had exactly zero CSS properties missing in IE6 (sorry, supporting + and > operators doesn't count), IE8 appears to be the direction IE should have been taking for the last eight years.

Newly supported/fixed:

• Border-spacing
• Pseudoselectors like before: and after:
• Text-align:center no longer incorrectly centers block elements like TABLE but instead cascades down to their first inline element (i.e. cell text). Unbelievable.
• The inherit related problems from IE6/7 seem to have been solved.
• I also note that a rendering bug in IE7 that makes overlapping CSS menus momentarily render with transparent boxes has been fixed.

However, still unsupported in IE while supported elsewhere:

• Quote character declarations
• Counter-reset
• List-style-type and list-style-image
• Font-size-adjust
• Letter-spacing and word-spacing
• Caption-side
• First-line and First-letter
• OBJECT still shits the bed. Get on the stick, dickweeds. OBJECT was supposed to replace IMG two or three NYC skyscrapers ago.
• I haven't tested BUTTON's ability to send the correct properties yet, but I'm not holding my breath.
• XHTML mime-type? Not on XP at any rate: it still attempts to download the file rather than render it.

Sadly, FF and IE still don't support font-stretch or text-shadow.

IE8 has made some progress compared to the pile of fail that was IE7. It still falls damned short of where an XHTML browser ought to be, and the things we told Microsoft to get straight two years ago.

It's disappointing that nothing short of harassment influences the likes of IE's dev staff.