Internet Explorer... Until recently, the web developers nightmare. Mention Internet Explorer 6 to a web developer, they’ll have nightmares for months! With a lack of support for many modern web elements (such as transparent PNG's), and a terribly different way to render websites, this 8 year old browser has recently been abandoned by a large number of developers. Even Microsoft themselves tried to get their own users to upgrade - offering meals to african families for each upgrade to IE8, doubled for those upgrading from IE6.
With the release of IE7, many improvements were made, and still more in IE8, so I’ll give Microsoft credit for improving their browser with these two releases to more closely match Safari and Firefox’s rendering style.
*Rendering - lets get that term out of the way, as I’ll use it quite a few times in this article. When I speak of “rendering’, I mean how a browser engine takes the HTML code and CSS it is provided and transforms it into the website you see in your browser window. Most browsers try to follow a set of web standards – the W3C specifications outlining how things should be rendered – Safari, Firefox and Chrome probably do the best job of adhering to the W3C’s rendering guidelines. Up until recently, Internet Explorer was usually the worst.
In the past couple versions of IE, Microsoft was simply playing catch up; trying to get their browser to render more closely to rival browsers. Over 50% of those on the internet are using IE still, with 25% of the world stuck using IE6 or IE7 with their flawed rendering engines. Given that many web developers officially abandoned IE6 over the past year, and have stopped putting in the extra effort to make their sites render correctly in IE6, this means that a lot of people are seeing a "broken" web. You can’t just cut out 50% of the internet by telling IE users off, so you had to carefully assess your options for what features you could implement and what you may need to rethink or provide some graceful degradation of functionality.
So, how does IE9 change this? Well, Microsoft have taken a huge leap forward with IE9. IE9 supports a large percentage of the new HTML5 features, along with CSS3 support. Scoring 83/100 on the Acid3 compatibility test and 100% on the CSS3 Selectors Test, the browser is finally showing some real changes. (Not to mention the speed - the current release is benchmarked to be more than 10x faster than IE8.) This is significant because the major roadblock for implementing new features in a website was waiting for IE to catch up. With IE9 being as good as the other modern browsers, web developers can invest the time and effort into developing advanced features without losing a large percentage of their user base.
As of June 2010, 85% of internet users are using Windows versions of at least Windows XP. 35% are using Vista and above (the minimum for Internet Explorer 9). For web developers, this means that once IE9 does get released, there will be a large percentage of people using a standards compliant browser. Either IE9 or Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Opera. Hopefully, more and more people will finally ditch IE6 and 7 for good in favour of this faster, more complete browser.
The final release for IE9 is scheduled sometime in 2011. Early perceptions of the preview releases that Microsoft has put out for developers have been well received. And I think most developers and tech knowledgeable users are glad to finally see the functionality that Internet Explorer has been missing for far too long. It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting where the internet is going as a platform.
In the meantime, death to IE!
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For a complete list of elements IE9 will support, see the Wikipedia entry.
In the meantime, death to IE!
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For a complete list of elements IE9 will support, see the Wikipedia entry.
