It would seem that those super smart folks at Microsoft might have figured out a way to leverage their immense market share while directly going head to head with the competition, namely Firefox and Safari.  The insider folks over at Smashing Magazine are reporting some important and exciting news for the release of Internet Explorer 8.1 (due out this summer).

Why should instructional designers and developers care?  Well, given the disappointing state of IE to render consistently to standards and standards, trying anything cross-browser or even cross-platform has been frustrating.  Hence all the hacks for CSS and browsers.  Some folks are so fed up with IE that they are pushing to retire IE6 from the world altogether. Smashing Magazine is reporting three important features to ISD.

1. Integration of Firefox plugins

Yep.  Read that again.  Smashing Mag says that IE 8.1 will support Mozilla-based plugins.  While not all of them will work perfectly, this is huge.  This is certainly how Microsoft will leverage the broad Windows and IE user base while accommodating the proliferation of add-ons developed for Firefox.  So, how do you compete with the competition?  You make your product accept all of your competitor’s third-party add-ons within your product, too.

2. Follows web standards

Smashing Mag also say that their preliminary tests from the Acid3 Test to confirm standards compliance was very good, too.  Can we finally reduce the number of hacks we have to embed into our code?

3. Multi-browser rendering

Finally, IE 8.1 should render to multiple browsers, including IE 7, Safari and Firefox.  Now, I have to admit that I thought this was already part of IE 8, but maybe they will make it more explicit or more accessible.

For the full story and descriptions of all of the features, check out Smashing Magazine’s article.  But what’s still missing?  What else do the Microsoft folks need to get on top on to make IE better at rendering instruction.

Here are some previous posts that you may be interested in:

1. IE8 released today
2. Plug-in to Dreamweaver: Adobe BrowserLab
3. You gotta luva campaign: Bring down IE6