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Promising but Controversial IE9 Platform Preview Released at MIX10

April 15th, 2010

Web Development

By now news has spread around the Web that Microsoft announced the Platform Preview of IE9 at MIX10. Our own John Sutton was there and touched on it in our blog here. Reactions around the Web have generally been positive, but there’s been some criticism about the marketing machine, their test results, the features they’re touting, the platform restrictions, and even the fake browser UI that’s been slapped on the thing.

It’s important to realize if you evaluate it that it’s just an early preview and the user interface is, generally speaking, not even there!

New Developer Features in IE9 and Demos

For a full list of the improvements, the work-in-progress, and some demos, check out the following links:

• Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers
• Platform Preview Release Notes
• IE9 Test Drive Site

CSS3

Microsoft supposedly is committed to full CSS3 support, but if you read the fine print it’s important to remember that CSS3 isn’t finished and is also quite modular, so this is sort of out there as a big black box. That said, the previews and such they’re showing are demonstrating remarkable support for CSS3 selectors, which is encouraging.

Highlights from the full list includes:

• border-radius and rounded corners
• RGBA colors
• opacity
• CSS3 background image support is coming
• nth-child() selectors
• nth-of-type() selectors
• :target selectors
• :enabled, :disabled, and :checked

CSS-Based Rounded Corners

Back in November I blogged about Microsoft’s announcement that IE9 would support rounded corners. This is huge from a development standpoint, and one of the newest blog posts over at the IEBlog actually goes to fairly great lengths to show the inconsistencies between browser implementations on large corners. Not only that, and I’m going to hang myself out there, but yes, their comparative screen shots actually make their version, dare I say, look better than the competition.

XHTML

New in the Platform Preview is IE parsing documents served with an “application/xhtml+xml” mime type, which is a day late and a dollar short, but that’s OK, I’m sure someone will be happy.

HTML5

The IE9 platform preview will recognize “generic” elements that are not part of any spec if styles are associated with them. IE8 and below ignored them, forcing users to create scripted workarounds to support the new elements in HTML5.

There is also support for both overlapping elements and the HTML5 selection API’s which enable scripting environments to detect selections made on pages.

SVG

For years SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) in Web browsers has floundered, and a large portion of the blame in fact can be leveled directly at Microsoft for not supporting it, therefore making it largely meaningless. Adobe even produced a Web browser plugin which was pretty neat but went by the wayside. Now Microsoft is supporting it with a vengeance, including dynamic scripting and transformation of SVG objects. This support of course includes basic shapes, fills, strokes, and paths.

The problem is, no one likes SVG. Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair, but the thing is there’s a better alternative these days in the HTML5-related spec which most all vendors are supporting (the powerful <canvas> element). Canvas enables things like the Processing JavaScript port.

Microsoft is being quiet on this one.

The Compatibility Meta Tag

IE9 continues the Microsoft trend of having compatibility meta tag available for developers to force IE into the correct rendering mode, if there’s ever any question. The new values for the content attribute are just ticked up to include “IE=9″:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9">

New Developer Tools

IE9′s set of developer tools which IE8 started to ship with, now includes an HTTP inspector, something that was missing from IE8. This makes it more on par with other tools available for Gecko (Mozilla) and WebKit (Safari/Chrome) based browsers.

JavaScript

IE9′s JavaScript engine has been enhanced for performance radically, with speeds more on par with the competition. The new engine includes many enhancements to their DOM compliance, including namespaces, ranges, and of particular interest the DOM event model being brought into the standards-bases world.

DOM Level 2 and 3 Events

For years Internet Explorer has supported it’s own brand of event models built on top of the DOM. Finally, after years of patching and branching code the shift will be made to the DOM3 standard event model, including addEventListener(). This last item has been a thorn in developer’s sides for ages.

Features For All Users

One of the biggest things Microsoft is touting is their new performance model. Built from the ground up with hardware acceleration in mind, the browser will unload expensive processing, both visual and computational to the computer’s hardware. This has massive performance boosts for the browser, which not only benefits users but developers as well.

This includes:

• Browser Performance
• Font Rendering
• HTML5 Video (wahoo!)
• JavaScript Performance

Aftershocks and Controversy Around the Release

Despite all of the above efforts which are quite grand, it wouldn’t be a Microsoft browser preview without people weighing in with their opinions.

The classic site Webmonkey had some harsh words in their article “Internet Explorer 9 Shows Up Faster, But Still Lacking“. They praised the improvements but slammed Microsoft for missing features available in the competition. It’s a harsh and somewhat true rebuke of course, but it’s not as though they haven’t come a long way and have an enormous hill to climb. Seeing the gradual improvements from IE7 on up is encouraging and I think only bodes well. Clearly Microsoft has made a commitment to enhanced standards support, and while the updates come slower than the competition, things are looking up.

There was some criticism also leveled at some of the testing suites and results that were published by Microsoft with the announcements.

Daniel Glazman, former Netscape engineer and member of the W3C CSS Working Group, took Microsoft to task in his post called “Microsoft, you should be ashamed“. He points out how they touted their standards support by passing their own tests, and claimed that the competition didn’t support them, when in fact they do.

The makers of the Opera Web browser also responded to the test suite results saying that they mislead people.

It’s interesting to report that Microsoft actually responded and issued some clarifications and corrections on the IE Blog. Wow. Clearly it was a marketing move to have the original statements and test results, but it’s great to see the IE Team actually respond. It’s a good thing, right?

Glazman responded with a appreciative post but pointed out he’d prefer it if browser vendors would just tout their own successes and not claim greatness at other’s expense. Nice idea, but marketing departments rarely like that it seems.

He says:

“Microsoft, show me the value of YOUR browser. Competitors to Microsoft, show me the value of YOUR browser. And let the press aggregate the data and show the masses who’s the best with comparative charts. Thanks.”

We’ll see.

Finally, Jeffery Zeldman posted a commentary on the article from last fall that Microsoft posted, and coincidentally Microsoft happened to make their new IE9 announcements while he was on a plane that same day. Appears someone over at ZDNet latched onto that in the context of the new announcement and took him to task as a well-known standards advocate and speaker. Of course, Zeldman responded with his own post wondering if the ZDNet author had even read his post.

The biggest thing to get from those posts is Zeldman’s comment “… there is no such thing as a calm discussion of improvements to a Microsoft browser“.

…Which is the absolute truth. When the browser has been a thorn in your side for years on a daily basis, it’s hard not to get worked up.

Will Developers Welcome IE9?

If you’re building Web sites today using front-end engineering techniques from HTMl5, CSS3, to modern JavaScripting, you have to. The improvements that Microsoft have implemented, particularly in IE8 and (now) coming in 9 are huge. No, they don’t trump the competition. But honestly, I’m not sure I want them to

It just goes to show that Microsoft just can’t win. MSIE has been a personal target of mine and my coworkers for ages, but let’s give credit where credit is due. For a monolithic organization such as Microsoft, the engineers working on IE are trying. Do I expect it to be perfect? No way. It’d be nice though.

Whoah. That’s right, that’s twice in two weeks (the other was in a meeting and I won’t repeat it here) I believe I’ve said something nice about Microsoft and IE. But don’t get used to it.