Is IE9 worth getting excited about?
At the 2009 Professional Developers Conference a couple of days ago Microsoft gave a quick preview of the next version of Internet Explorer – version 9. What they showed was a browser that was moving slowly towards being standards compliant, to a certain degree. The point was made that standards were not everything, and that the browser should have some new and exciting features that might go beyond the standards developed by the W3C. It was surprising to see Microsoft bragging about scoring a 32/100 on the Acid3 test, and it did not bode well for web developers who desire to have a fully standards complaint browser for them to work with in the future. Having all major browsers following the same set of standards would make their lives considerably easier.
Speaking of the web developers and how they felt about the introduction of another version of Internet Explorer… over at the official MSDN blog http://tinyurl.com/yft9kmc ) the comments were largely negative. Many developers seemed to be of the mindset that Internet Explorer’s time had come and gone and that Microsoft should either ship a competitor’s browser or just make IE9 a webkit based browser. Webkit is the engine behind Apple’s Safari, Firefox, and Google’s Chrome browsers. Safari and Chrome both score a 100/100 on the Acid3 test and are fully standards compliant.
Perhaps the biggest complaint about the new IE9 is that it uses hardware acceleration technology that has not been ported to Windows XP, leading to speculation that XP users will be stuck on IE8 as the top choice. While that isn’t really a big deal to the average consumer, it does mean that web developers will have to develop websites and test them for compatibility with IE6, IE7 and 8, IE9, and webkit based browsers. Some developers have gone so far as to exclude IE6 browsers from their testing, instead directing users with the older browser from Microsoft to upgrade to Firefox.
Microsoft’s decision on IE9 to go their own route and try to force everyone into both upgrading their operating systems from XP and into developing websites that take advantage of the as-of-yet unnamed new features of IE9 while still making sure sites are backwards compatible with IE6, 7, and 8 instead of using a standards based browser make the development and eventual release of IE9 a virtual non-starter for most.
SOURCE : http://feed.lockergnome.com/nexus/all
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISITE AUTHOR WEBSITE
Popularity: -1% [?]
