The evolution of Internet Explorer has brought the next iteration of the proprietary browser from Microsoft closer to rivals from Mozilla, Google, Apple and Opera, while taking it further from predecessors such as IE7 and IE6. This is the Redmond company doing its best to embrace the other side of the barricade in terms of modern web-standard support, interoperability and same markup. Internet Explorer 9 will be on par with rivals such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, and will bridge the interoperability gap that separated releases such as IE7 and IE6 from competitive browsers.

As a direct consequence of this, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer, asked developers to not treat IE9 differently from how they would treat Firefox, Chrome or Opera, but definitely different from IE7, for example.

“Since releasing the first Platform Preview, we’ve answered a lot of developer questions. Here’s a recent one from a GMail engineer: ‘Sometimes we have to do browser detection, and we tend to group all IEs together, with the occasional branch based on version. Should we treat IE9 entirely differently? Is it intended to behave closer to webkit/gecko than IE7/8’?” Hachamovitch stated.

I’ll let the IE GM provide the answer: “Our answer is an emphatic YES. IE9’s standards support makes it much closer, for developers, to Gecko, Presto, and the different versions of Webkit than it is to IE7. We want to make the same markup work across browsers, and want feedback from developers about the issues they find offering the same markup to IE9.”

To put it simple, developers that perform browser detection with their websites, and have constructed special versions of their sites tailored to Internet Explorer need to stop doing it with Internet Explorer 9. As it is clearly visible from the IE9 Platform Preview 2 Acid3 Test score of 68/100, Microsoft is constantly improving support for modern web standards such as SVG, HTML5, CSS3, and will catch up with browsers that are already at 100/100. At that point, detecting IE9 as just IE, and treating it like IE7, for example, will only guarantee that webpages are broken, much in the same manner Firefox or Chrome would display content tailored to IE6 or IE7.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 2 Build 1.9.7766.6000 is available for download here.