[singularity]

A Newsletter I received from Microsoft regarding HTML5 in IE9.

Quote

On 15th September, we released the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, receiving highly positive press coverage. We want you to enjoy a faster, more immersive web that uses the full power of your Windows PC, so we made IE9 fast with GPU-powered HTML5. Your favorite sites will shine with a clean new UI that integrates web sites into the Windows 7 experience you already know. Because malicious and poorly written sites threaten the reliability, privacy and safety of your online experience, IE9 delivers new protections that continue our leadership in being the world's most trusted browser. It also delivers excellent support for HTML5 and other modern standards, so the same markup works across more browsers, and the web is more interoperable.

Once you have downloaded IE9, head over to www.beautyoftheweb.com to learn about the rest of IE9 and experience some of the early sites developers have built using IE9 and Windows.

We also worked hard to refresh your favorite destination - MSDN. Based on your inputs, the all-new MSDN focuses on key developer priorities, highlights local connections and brings to you the latest content in a seamless manner. Let us know what you think!

Hope you find it helpful.

[Dannyboy997]

Finally Microsoft is stepping up there game.

Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have been incorporating and optimizing HTML5 for a while now.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever fail with IE?

-Daniel

[Atli]

Quote

... IE9 delivers new protections that continue our leadership in being the world's most trusted browser. It also delivers excellent support for HTML5 and other modern standards, so the same markup works across more browsers, and the web is more interoperable.

Hah, funny. I see the Microsoft propaganda machine is in full motion.

Sure, the IE9 beta isn't bad, compared to IE8 (I'm testing it as we speak), but honestly it falls short of what I was expecting... and I don't expect much of Microsoft. Not nearly as much as I epxect of Mozilla or Chrome, anyways. (No text-shadow support! )

The best thing that can be said about this version is that it copies a lot of Chrome's UI (which is excellent!). The standards support remains ~2-5 years behind Firefox and Chrome (as usual), but I have to give them props for implementing some HTML5 and CSS3, however limited. - I was also hoping to see them include OGG or V8 video codecs, but they have apparently chosen to support only proprietary codecs. (Essentially trying to strong-arm open-source browsers out of the competition.)

[singularity]

Referring to the website beautyoftheweb. It clearly seems IE9 is intended for consumers. Developers have been kept least in mind.

[Atli]

Yea they always seem to target consumers rather than developers with their propaganda campaigns. - It's a lot easier to convince non-developers that features existing in all the other browsers for a year or two are impressive today. The only thing I see in IE9 that is not old news for the other browsers is the accelerated graphics, and the next releases of Chrome and Firefox (both of which will be released weeks or months ahead of IE9) seem to support just that.

There is also something about the text rendering in IE9. Seems smoother than what I'm used to. I attribute this to the accelerated graphics as well though. Haven't tested how this is in the upcoming Firefox or Chrome releases.

[drhowarddrfine]

Hardware acceleration has been in the nightly builds of Firefox since last year. Chrome turned it on last week.

As always, IE9 will be woefully behind in support of HTML5 and CSS3 compared to the other browsers. It's SVG is incomplete. No CSS transitions, animation or flex box. Too many things to remember but someone said it's about two years behind all the others today.

IE9 has a fixed target while all the others update every few weeks or months. It could be 3 years or more, if an IE10 comes out, before you see any improvements in IE. Firefox4 comes out in November and is already ahead of IE9 in modern standards support. So what does that tell us about IE9?

It's a lousy browser already and it won't even be released till next year.

This post has been edited by drhowarddrfine: 27 September 2010 - 02:17 PM