IE9 is still behind the times
Posted by shapeshed on 4th June 2010
Although it has gradually been loosing market share to competitors like Safari, Firefox and Chrome, Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser in many industries. For a long time web creatives have pushed Microsoft to improve support for web standards and to their credit they have been improving things.
A biased report
The Internet Explorer Team recently published a report of tests showing that IE9 outstrips many of its competitors. On the face of it these tests are encouraging. The web needs a standards compliant browser from Microsoft. But these tests are misleading. The tests are largely tailored for IE9’s capabilities and the test suite completely ignores the Acid 3 test in which IE9 scores 55% according to Microsoft’s own reports. Acid 3 is the benchmark by which all other standards compliant browser vendors measure their capabilities. There is also an independent HTML5 test that would seem to have been largely ignored by the IE team.
Why does this matter?
Standards facilitate interoperability and openness on the web. The best browsers in terms of product in the market are well ahead of IE9. But in this market it hasn’t historically been the case that the best product has risen to the top (even though browsers are free). For the progress of the web it is important that new standards like HTML5 are adopted and available to users. Users of Internet Explorer are likely to have a significantly poorer experience on the web whether using new or old standards.
At pebble.it we recommend Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft is still demonstrably behind in terms of speed and standards support, even if their slightly skewed reports would suggest otherwise.
Tags:
