14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s efforts around HTML5 and JavaScript in the context of Internet Explorer’s evolution will surpass those of rivals Google and Mozilla, according to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. The CEO of the third largest technology company in the world after Apple and IBM, revealed during the Microsoft Developer Forum in Tokyo, Japan on May 23, 2011, that the software giant continues to be committed to IE.
Following the finalization of IE9 earlier this year, the IE team started offering developers the first Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 10, which continues to be available for download.
As far as I’m concerned, Ballmer is talking about IE10, since it’s the next version of Internet Explorer, as well as HTML5, although he only mentions HTML.
Here is what Microsoft’s CEO had to say about the present and the future of IE:
“Internet Explorer 9 is the fastest browser around because of the way that we've married it to Windows systems and allow essentially full exploitation of the hardware to have the fastest and most beautiful Web on the planet run on Windows systems.
“We've integrated the browser into Windows more fully, so that you can put jumplists, and pin those to the taskbar on Windows. We've improved JavaScript performance. We're running on downloads that are about five times the rate of customer acceptance that we saw on IE8.
“And when it comes to HTML and JavaScript, and the browser, there will be simply no one who pushes that, not Google, not Firefox, nobody will push that faster and harder than we push with IE.” (emphasis added)
IE has long been regarded as an anchor holding the entire web back because of its ubiquity in combination to poor modern web standards support.
However, with the advent of IE9 Microsoft reinvented IE, and completely changed its strategy around web standards support.
While work still remains to be done, IE9 is the most compatible versions of Internet Explorer in history, playing nice with HTML5, CSS3, DOM, SVG and others, and pushing hardware acceleration to unmatched limits.
From what I’ve seen with IE10, Microsoft is only going to up the ante, and considering that IE9 is already an excellent alternative to Chrome and Firefox, give users even additional reasons to switch back to IE.
Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Platform Preview 1 (PP1) is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.