IE9 to support SVG and some CSS3
msdn.microsoft.com
msdn.microsoft.com
I personally find the CSS stuff less interesting as you can do a lot with clever programming to make things look great, but you can't easily emulate local storage(flash storage), canvas(flash) or websockets(comet). (emulation in parentheses, each being excessively complicated for the average developer)
Microsoft and Telcos just remind us that technological progress is bad for their personal business, which is so infuriating.
(With telcos, it's the whole thing with not just letting app developers and customers do whatever they want with their data plan and apps they use/build.
As you can see CSS3 is very far from being "finalized" so any implementation that mozilla or webkit or someone does is just their best guess at what the final standard will be or experiments to provide recommendation. They leave the prefix free version for when they actually know what it is they are implementing to cause less pain in the long term allowing developers to know full well that what they are using is far from finished.
Microsoft themselves added HTML5 features to IE8, and have more planned for IE9 so saying they're HTML5 isn't in itself a valid reason not to bother implementing them.
Some people believe that independent implementations of standards can uncover areas that are unclear or impossible and make the standard much better from the experience gained. Microsoft are notable in complaining about this in standards that threaten their profits while at the same time just doing their own thing in code and later trying to get it standardised, warts'n'all. It is more than a little hypocritical.
It's probably just me, but that sounds awfully presumptuous. Like someone's reminding me that I need IE.
Edit: Wow, this thing is full of great little nuggets:
"We know you don’t want to have to rewrite and retest your websites again and again; standards adoption by browser vendors is a good way to reach that objective."
Hrmm. Really?
edit: Slightly better news straight from the horse's mouth:
Andy Lees: We don't support Flash. Performance on Flash is a problem. So we don't do that. We have Internet Explorer. It's halfway between IE7 and IE8 rendering engine.
Found via the Wikipedia page:
In comparison to that prospect, an IE7/8 mishmash is oddly comforting.
All modern smartphones have some kind of HTML 5 support and most mobile websites use the iPhone as their main target. So it is sad to see so many good decisions on Win7 Phone going to waste because of really old/legacy technology.
I guess it's impossible for Microsoft to use Webkit, politically speaking.
I feel like only a bold move like that would give IE any hope of preventing a further slide into irrelevance.
So if they were to implement HTML5 as it stands today, they'd release IE9 to find that the other browsers had coordinated with the W3 to release the final standards alongside FF4 and a new version of Chrome.
That's how it worked back when NN6 came out, and how it's worked ever since. It's hard to have sympathy for Microsoft in particular in this area, but that's what they're up against.
An example of this would be the CSS Box Model, which had reference implementations in both IE and NN at the time the spec was written. The spec changed how width was calculated, leaving every existing browser incompatible, and leading to silly things like Netscape.com not rendering correctly in the first released version of Netscape 6.
Nowadays, it's a mystery why MS gets left out of the loop. The standards committees are still non-MS dominated, so conspiricy-theorists could conclude that there's still some collusion between the Mozilla & WebKit teams and the W3. Or it could simply be Microsoft not wanting to get burned yet again.
There's a reason why Twiddla is so fast on IE. It's because we intentionally leave the Doctype of the whiteboard, thus enabling IE to use its fast Quirksmode rendering engine. Testing showed that adding a Doctype didn't effect FF or Chrome performance at all, but simply slowed IE down to their level.
IME, the current trend is that there are still quite a few people using IE6 (the hold-out corporations) but they are dying out. However, a lot of other IE users, perhaps even most of them, do upgrade reasonably quickly now, because there isn't the same incentive to stick with something like IE7. Since users of other browsers also tend to upgrade fairly quickly because everyone has auto-updates these days, I am optimistic that even relatively simple steps like including some CSS3 and SVG in IE9 will make a big and fairly rapid difference in practice to what a web designer can use in production sites.
I guess I was more looking at it from Microsoft's perspective. Are they serious about competing? If so, merely matching the features that other mainstream browsers have had for some time now isn't going to get them very far. Keep in mind that by the time IE9 is actually released, we'll probably have already seen major version releases from the other players.
To me, full CSS3 support and at least an attempt at full HTML5 would be a bold way for IE to jump back into the race as a true leader, not just an also-ran contender.
As one anecdotal contribution, I now know more people who have switched back to IE recently than switched away from it, and these are all technically knowledgeable people who are well aware of the alternatives. They're just fed up of the numerous flaws in the rival browsers and feel they get a better experience with IE8. Looking objectively, it's not hard to see why.
Firefox now runs slower than a sleeping tortoise and claims more system resources than Windows Vista on a bad day. Its main strength has always been its plug-in system, but that same system also causes both stability problems and multiple obvious but apparently WONTFIX security and privacy risks. It still runs all tabs under one process, so it is laughably easy to lock up the entire browser and lose anything you were doing on other pages.
Chrome has some basic rendering bugs, ironically including CSS3-style rounded corners, which have actually been getting worse in recent versions. And it, too, has its share of privacy concerns for some people, not the least of which is the name "Google" that appears before the "Chrome" part.
I don't run Safari myself, but I hear cursing regularly from colleagues who do about pages that simply don't work, so clearly all is not well there either.
In comparison, while IE has moved slower than the rest of the browsers, IE8 is already reasonably quick, renders the pages non-geeks read reliably, actually has better tab isolation than anyone else, etc. If IE9 does bring the same kind of performance jump for JS execution and support for the most useful CSS3 features, so it catches up with the recent trends (which, in fairness, only really took off after IE8 was out) then I'll be tempted to switch back myself.
They won't support HTML5/Canvas fully until IE13 at this rate. It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard.
Microsoft wants Windows to be mandatory for web surfing. That's the goal, that's why IE still exists.
So. Microsoft is losing lots of browser marketshare every year to keep selling Windows copies to web developers that represent, say, 0.05% of all users?
"It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard.
That make more sense. And I think you're right with that.
IE is still the dominant browser on most sites, so maybe that strategy still has value. It's becoming less and less significant as OS X (which comes with Safari by default) and Firefox gain marketshare. I wonder when they'll decide they need to reconsider; IE has certainly cost them a lot so far, legally.
If IE worked fine people will abandon it? I think it's backwards.
And remember we are not talking only about implementing web standards, but also security issues, stability and velocity.
It's becoming less and less significant as OS X (which comes with Safari by default) and Firefox gain marketshare
I think Chrome will eat more IE market share than Firefox and Safari in the following years, mostly because Google's massive advertisement capacity.
More likely because Google is big and ubiquitous, and people trust them. "Oh look, Google does one of those browser things, and they tell me it's fast. I wonder what happens if I download it..."
Chrome startup on my Ubuntu and Windows boxes is an order of magnitude faster than Firefox, and significantly faster than IE. I can open a Chrome window and navigate through two pages before FF even opens--even if I started FF first.
That's a tremendous incentive to switch, even if Youtube videos are broken sometimes. :) I haven't looked back.
I suspect there are some execs who are still not so eager to support open standards, but the IE devs are very willing to change for good.
They were hinting at doing SVG a few months ago, it's nice to see they're stating it officially.