It's been more than two years since Microsoft brought its browser development group out of mothballs and released IE7. It was a great step forward from IE6, but Microsoft was so far behind that it couldn't catch up in a single version step. Now Microsoft is on the verge of releasing Internet Explorer 8.For Web developers, IE8 delivers some very good news. It finally has an excellent debugger and document tree inspector. Support for standards is better in IE8, including for emerging standards such as ARIA. The IE team also has done quite a bit to improve the performance of both JavaScript and the rendering engine. Finally, it's possible to develop and debug Web applications in Internet Explorer, rather than using Firefox/Firebug and desperately hoping IE would behave the same way.

There's one major area where IE8 hasn't moved an inch as far as standards are concerned, and that's event handling. IE still uses an attachEvent method of its own invention; all the other players have long supported the W3C addEventListener method. IE uses a global event object; the W3C says that the event information should be passed as the first argument to the event handler function. And many of the properties and methods in IE's event object still don't conform to W3C standards.

Although IE's unchanged behavior for event handling is disappointing, it's not fatal. IE has been a bad boy for so long that every Web framework already has well-tested workarounds to deal with its quirks. Sometimes the change is harder to handle than the status quo; perhaps that's what led IE to take no action on its event code. So it looks like we'll need to wait for at least IE9 before there's any hope of full compliance with W3C standards that were finalized more than a decade ago.

For day-to-day browsing, though, the deciding factor may be the availability of good plug-ins. In that department, Firefox is so far ahead of everyone else it isn't funny. The availability of plug-ins alone makes Firefox my personal top choice. I like IE, Opera, and Chrome as well, but without my plug-ins it's just not home. IE's market dominance in the early part of the decade made it a magnet for lots of low-quality toolbars and plug-ins that seem like marketing tools.

On balance, there's no doubt that IE8 is a big step ahead for Internet Explorer. The problem for Microsoft is that IE was so far behind that another big step isn't enough. Five years of browser neglect hasn't been fully remedied by IE7 and IE8, and its lack of a lively plug-in community makes it less attractive. For companies that insist on staying with IE as their browser platform of choice, though, IE8 seems like a safe bet. It's a must-have for any Luddite enterprises that are still stuck on IE6 -- you know who you are.