14 DAY TRIAL // MIX10, Microsoft’s web-centric conference, is now less than two weeks away, and, with Dean Hachamovitch, the IE general manager, keynoting the event, expectations involving Internet Explorer 9 could not be higher. One year after it launched Internet Explorer 8 to the public, Microsoft is set to showcase the progress made with the development of IE9 since the Professional Developers Conference 2009 demo, also courtesy of Hachamovitch.
“What would our premier web conference be without a browser update!? Dean will talk about changes and improvements that have been made to Internet Explorer 9 since PDC09, and his talk is sure to include a couple of surprises,” an excerpt from a post on the MIX10 blog in mid-February reads.
Terms as ‘changes,’ ‘improvements’ and ‘surprises’ obviously need to be underlined. Microsoft has detailed no specifics in relation to IE9 at MIX10, but speculation has been produced to fill in the gaps left empty by the company. Microsoft is expected to go on the counteroffensive with Internet Explorer 9, and deliver a browser release that will be on par with rivals Opera, Firefox and Chrome and take them head-on.
The software giant has certainly indicated that, at least in terms of JavaScript performance, IE9 will hold its own against competitors. Equipped with a new JavaScript engine, Internet Explorer 9 will be tuned to deal with JS at the same speed as rival browsers. The next iteration will also sport hardware acceleration for text and 2D graphics by leveraging the DirectWrite and Direct2D application programming interfaces (APIs) in Windows 7 and Windows Vista via DirectX 11. This much is clear, and has already been confirmed by Microsoft.
Microsoft watchers even expect the software giant to deliver at least a developer preview, if not the first Beta Build of Internet Explorer 9, at MIX10 (March 15-17th, 2010, Las Vegas). The time seems right at least for a developer-oriented IE9 Technology Preview, after all, web devs are a very vocal and extremely critic group that have scorned Internet Explorer to the point of saturation, and are a crowd that Microsoft needs to win back. Wishful thinking could never hurt that much in this regard.
However, it might be best to manage expectations better. And one area in which such an approach should be implemented is modern web standards support in IE9. As far as web standards are concerned, expectations are that I9E will bring to the table broader support for HTML5, vector graphics and the evolution of CSS standards. To what extent? Nobody can tell yet. Microsoft certainly doesn’t want to tell anything ahead of MIX10.
However, reading too much into the few IE9-related sessions at MIX10, namely “SVG: The Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web” and “HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today,” might yet again lead to a scenario in which Microsoft would seem like it is underachieving.
Back at PDC 2009 in November, the company emphasized that it would do its best to ace the Acid3 Test. Realistic expectations of IE9 involve the browser coming as close as possible to the perfect 100/100 score in the Acid3 Test, which would certainly be a huge improvement in terms of HTML5 and CSS3 support. But IE9 will in no way embrace HTML5 and CSS3 completely, that much is guaranteed.
Realistic IE9 expectations should also involve some sort of alignment with the evolution of Scalable Vector Graphics, both from the perspective of a format and a platform. Notice that I say alignment instead of support precisely because Microsoft has not confirmed SVG support, but, after all, the company did not join the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for nothing.
What is extremely interesting is the way in which the IE team thinks of the evolution of Internet Explorer. IE8 for example, features a Quirks More, an IE7 Standards Mode and the IE8 Standards Mode, enabling the latest version of the browser to play nice with legacy web content. A glimpse of how the IE team prioritized compatibility and interoperability for IE8 was offered by Marc Silbey, program manager.
“We designed IE8 with a few principles in mind:
“1. Render websites in the most standards compliant way by default. We’re committed to interoperability, which means rendering websites in the most standards compliant way possible by default.
“2. Users expect the web to just work in IE. A small set of users will tinker to get websites that expect and work best in IE7 Standards Mode to work in IE8’s more standards-compliant default mode. For everyone else, IE8 includes Compatibility View Settings.
“The best experience here is one that works automatically as the web developer intended. This is why we created the Compatibility View List. It’s also important to give users the ability to fix websites that aren’t on the list yet through the Compatibility View button.
“3. Web developers are in control of how their content renders. The X-UA-Compatible meta tag and header override IE and user settings. They also provide web developers with fine-grain control over how each webpage renders in IE.
“For example, some websites have pages written for Quirks and others for IE7 Standards. When IE receives an X-UA-Compatible header with an EmulateIE7 value from servers, it renders each page in the appropriate Quirks or IE7 Standards Mode.
“4. Give web developers tools and time to help transition their content to IE8 Standards. IE8 introduced the X-UA-Compatible meta tag and header to provide web developers time to transition their websites to IE8 Standards. As mentioned above, many websites have already used this mechanism to specify that their content should run in IE7 Standards Mode.”
IE8 was built with Hachamovitch at the helm, just as Internet Explorer 9 is being built today. I don’t think that I’m going out on a limb when I say that the same principles will apply to IE9. Microsoft has after all taken upon itself to “not break the web.”