I don't get it. Their brand new phone doesn't support HTML5.
On the plus side, continents may not move very quickly or in the precise direction that one might desire, but they do move.
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
Sounds like it takes years to get the legs moving together, which means it's too late for IE9 on the phone for a while...
...Okay. It's not an easy job to align products and release cycles. Microsoft was already late on WP7. They probably missed a cycle and Android kicked in. Microsoft doesn't want to be late anymore. Meaning, they probably couldn't wait for IE9 for mobile to be released (which wouldn't be a HUGE job if you have a working, stable, and RC version of IE9).
In conclusion, Microsoft is being smart that they release the phone and let people dive/absorb/digest earlier instead of waiting for full featured phone OS with a HTML5 supported browser, which is still in beta for desktops. However, this just means..the next release of WP7 will be very interesting. Remember, Android and iPhone OS (which wasn't iOS at the time) weren't closed to feature complete with their first release. I'm an Android user, and I can remember when I first bought my Droid, it went through so many updates software updates. Companies just have to cut things if one or two things will block the entire release.
It's not like pivoting an entire ecosystem. It's about launching a mobile browser that doesn't suck.
Using WebKit (and possibly even the JS-processing code Google pushes back to the WebKit community), they could get it up and running in far less time than it would take to build it themselves. A small (or large, well-organized) company wouldn't have legacy issues like this (or at least wouldn't let them get in the way of making the right decision).
The only reason Windows has a browser these days is that Microsoft succeeded in destroying Netscape, but, by the time they did it, it was too late to destroy the web. Had they arrived at the game when NCSA Mosaic was the dominant browser and succeeded in fragmenting the transport and presentation layers with competing protocols and formats, the web would be completely different today.
In a perfect world they would have shipped the phone with WebKit, but we all know that Microsoft is not going to do that (I'd love to be proven wrong).
Yes we love HTML5, but we won't have any of it on our most popular OS or our new mobile phone
...wtf?
But they don't. They still support it and they still sell it. In fact, they will keep selling it until 2020. That's 10 more years! Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179109/Microsoft_ext...
Now, can you seriously sit there and tell me it's reasonable for MS to sell an OS for ten more years (totaling about 20 years!) without releasing a single HTML5 capable browser for it?
And then comment that they're "embracing" HTML5? Ridiculous.
I think when MSFT talks about HTML5, what they tend to mean by it is web applications with desktop-like rich UIs, fancy graphics (that, in particular, require hardware acceleration on powerful PCs to run smoothly), etc. They have decided it's in their interest to encourage the proliferation of such applications (expect to see a lot of tools to help this along - Microsoft have already released an Adobe Illustrator plug in to export to HTML <canvas> (http://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/) and Blend 5 is strongly rumored to support SVG/<canvas> as a target platform) for two reasons:
1. They think it's a chance to differentiate their web properties, especially by moving them toward a rich-client model in which they already have experience. They tried to do that with Silverlight previously but didn't get enough acceptance from various quarters. They probably think it's an opportunity for their development tools business as well (in particular, <canvas> being a low level API leaves a lot of room for new frameworks on top of it).
2. If rich-UI, CPU/GPU-hungry HTML5 sites become common, people who haven't upgraded in a while will need newer browsers and PCs to view them correctly. Of course, Microsoft is hoping to encourage them to move to IE9 and therefore to Windows 7, but even if they go to another browser instead, if they're on older computers they'll still need to upgrade their PC for the sites to run well, regardless of what browser they're using, and by default that means moving to a W7/8/ ... machine. I think this is probably the most important consideration for them.