In the aftermath of the recent announcement of some additional CSS2.1 test passed by IE 8 RC1 I got curious if this latest version of their soon-to-be-released browser is finally able to render SVG graphics (at least they got the PNG alpha channel right in IE7). A vanilla installation of Windows 7 Public Beta provided a good opportunity to try some SVG tests online. There was especially one test that did show my mood on the results very clear:

This site should show a green smiley if SVG can be rendered correctly and which overlays a red one, which is only visible when the browser is incapable  of SVG.

It turned out that Microsoft didn't even try to implement it but rather leave it up to thrid party developers to write SVG rendering addons for IE8.

Firefox passed the same test without any complaints!