11 ms·

IE9 to support SVG and some CSS3

36 points by kilian 17y ago

timmorgan 17y ago
"As a developer, you want to know what’s to come in the browsers you and your customers use.... This document instructs you, the Web developer whose customers rely on Internet Explorer, about how to prepare to take advantage of these new enhancements in your websites and applications." It's probably just me, but that sounds awfully presumptuous. Like someone's reminding me that I need IE. Edit: Wow, this thing is full of great little nuggets: "We know you don’t want to have to rewrite and retest your websites again and again; standards adoption by browser vendors is a good way to reach that objective." Hrmm. Really?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
jsdalton 17y ago
Maybe it's naive of me to think this, but why don't they just go all out and announce full support for CSS3? (And HTML5 while they are at it, though I realize the spec is still in flux.) I mean, is rounded borders really the best they can do in 2010? I feel like only a bold move like that would give IE any hope of preventing a further slide into irrelevance.
- jasonkester 17y ago
  They're in the same damned-if-you-do position they've always been in. Every time they release something that breaks new ground, the "standards" folks move in the other direction and leave them behind. Look at SVG, DOM and CSS for examples where Microsoft moved first, only to see "Standards" written to suit the next version of Netscape's (later Mozilla's) browser. So if they were to implement HTML5 as it stands today, they'd release IE9 to find that the other browsers had coordinated with the W3 to release the final standards alongside FF4 and a new version of Chrome. That's how it worked back when NN6 came out, and how it's worked ever since. It's hard to have sympathy for Microsoft in particular in this area, but that's what they're up against.
  - eru 17y ago
    Why do the other guys seem to have an easier time capturing the standards process?
    - jasonkester 17y ago
      In the past, the "other guys" were the driving force behind the standards movement, so they could essentially write the standards as they built their product. They also had reason not to like MS very much (since they were involved in anti-trust litigation at the time), so they did things that in hindsight appear to be simply out of spite. An example of this would be the CSS Box Model, which had reference implementations in both IE and NN at the time the spec was written. The spec changed how width was calculated, leaving every existing browser incompatible, and leading to silly things like Netscape.com not rendering correctly in the first released version of Netscape 6. Nowadays, it's a mystery why MS gets left out of the loop. The standards committees are still non-MS dominated, so conspiricy-theorists could conclude that there's still some collusion between the Mozilla & WebKit teams and the W3. Or it could simply be Microsoft not wanting to get burned yet again.
    - youngian 17y ago
      The knee-jerk answer is that the IE team's ideas often seem to come from a crack pipe. Not to say that every single one of their ideas has been bad, or that everyone else's ideas always turn out great, but IE has a lousy track record. There are more than a few instances where the IE version is either internally inconsistent (many of the IE6 CSS bugs) or provably worse than the competition (JS event handling springs to mind).
      - jasonkester 17y ago
        Ah, but their Box Model is miles faster. Common sense would tell you that knowing an element specified to have a width:100px will actually take up 100px on the screen will speed up rendering. Actual practice shows that it is indeed really fast. There's a reason why Twiddla is so fast on IE. It's because we intentionally leave the Doctype of the whiteboard, thus enabling IE to use its fast Quirksmode rendering engine. Testing showed that adding a Doctype didn't effect FF or Chrome performance at all, but simply slowed IE down to their level.
- tvon 17y ago
  My guess is that backwards compatibility is much more of an issue for Microsoft, if they implement an in-flux spec then they'll essentially have to keep whatever implementation they come up with regardless of how the spec changes, or face pissing off a lot of enterprisy types.
- Silhouette 17y ago
  You mock them, but I for one would be glad if a new version of IE supported rounded corners, RGBA colours and SVG. These are useful things where IE lagging behind has caused headaches for web developers for several years now, as we couldn't take advantage of the much easier ways of doing things in most browsers without having to write it all twice for IE anyway. IME, the current trend is that there are still quite a few people using IE6 (the hold-out corporations) but they are dying out. However, a lot of other IE users, perhaps even most of them, do upgrade reasonably quickly now, because there isn't the same incentive to stick with something like IE7. Since users of other browsers also tend to upgrade fairly quickly because everyone has auto-updates these days, I am optimistic that even relatively simple steps like including some CSS3 and SVG in IE9 will make a big and fairly rapid difference in practice to what a web designer can use in production sites.
  - jsdalton 17y ago
    I actually wasn't mocking them, and as a web developer I too am happy to hear they are at least providing minimal support for some of these common CSS3 features. I'm also thrilled that they are putting effort into HTML5. I guess I was more looking at it from Microsoft's perspective. Are they serious about competing? If so, merely matching the features that other mainstream browsers have had for some time now isn't going to get them very far. Keep in mind that by the time IE9 is actually released, we'll probably have already seen major version releases from the other players. To me, full CSS3 support and at least an attempt at full HTML5 would be a bold way for IE to jump back into the race as a true leader, not just an also-ran contender.
    - Silhouette 17y ago
      FWIW, I think you're being a little unfair to IE's position in the market as well. Not only does it still command the majority of the browser market by some margin, i.e., outnumbering users of all rival browsers put together, it is also a pretty decent bit of software these days. As one anecdotal contribution, I now know more people who have switched back to IE recently than switched away from it, and these are all technically knowledgeable people who are well aware of the alternatives. They're just fed up of the numerous flaws in the rival browsers and feel they get a better experience with IE8. Looking objectively, it's not hard to see why. Firefox now runs slower than a sleeping tortoise and claims more system resources than Windows Vista on a bad day. Its main strength has always been its plug-in system, but that same system also causes both stability problems and multiple obvious but apparently WONTFIX security and privacy risks. It still runs all tabs under one process, so it is laughably easy to lock up the entire browser and lose anything you were doing on other pages. Chrome has some basic rendering bugs, ironically including CSS3-style rounded corners, which have actually been getting worse in recent versions. And it, too, has its share of privacy concerns for some people, not the least of which is the name "Google" that appears before the "Chrome" part. I don't run Safari myself, but I hear cursing regularly from colleagues who do about pages that simply don't work, so clearly all is not well there either. In comparison, while IE has moved slower than the rest of the browsers, IE8 is already reasonably quick, renders the pages non-geeks read reliably, actually has better tab isolation than anyone else, etc. If IE9 does bring the same kind of performance jump for JS execution and support for the most useful CSS3 features, so it catches up with the recent trends (which, in fairness, only really took off after IE8 was out) then I'll be tempted to switch back myself.
endergen 17y ago
Where the shit is any of the cool stuff. Specifically Canvas, Websockets, Local Storage, etc. I personally find the CSS stuff less interesting as you can do a lot with clever programming to make things look great, but you can't easily emulate local storage(flash storage), canvas(flash) or websockets(comet). (emulation in parentheses, each being excessively complicated for the average developer) Microsoft and Telcos just remind us that technological progress is bad for their personal business, which is so infuriating. (With telcos, it's the whole thing with not just letting app developers and customers do whatever they want with their data plan and apps they use/build.
- smackfu 17y ago
  Those are all HTML5 features, right? We've gotten into this weird place where the standards are being implemented while they are still in flux because the browser makers are just anxious to add new features.
  - tvon 17y ago
    True, but it's a big improvement over browser makers rolling their own solutions.
    - smackfu 17y ago
      How many different version of CSS Gradients are out there now? It seems like they still just roll their own, but now they do it in an "accepted way" by using a prefix like "webkit" or "moz" on their new stuff. It doesn't do much good for the implementers though.
      - tdmackey 17y ago
        http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.html http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.html As you can see CSS3 is very far from being "finalized" so any implementation that mozilla or webkit or someone does is just their best guess at what the final standard will be or experiments to provide recommendation. They leave the prefix free version for when they actually know what it is they are implementing to cause less pain in the long term allowing developers to know full well that what they are using is far from finished.
cookiecaper 17y ago
Microsoft does not want IE to work according to standard and they don't want to provide a full featureset. A lot of smart people work at Microsoft, it's not like they can't figure this out. Microsoft's business strategy involves differentiating IE in basics like rendering and performance so that you have to buy Windows, test your websites in IE, and I think they still hope that they'll return to utter dominance one day. In so doing, they want you to decide that it's only worth your time to support IE since that's what most of your userbase uses anyway, thereby also requiring Windows for the web. They won't support HTML5/Canvas fully until IE13 at this rate. It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard. Microsoft wants Windows to be mandatory for web surfing. That's the goal, that's why IE still exists.
- barredo 17y ago
  "Microsoft's business strategy involves differentiating IE in basics like rendering and performance so that you have to buy Windows, test your websites in IE" So. Microsoft is losing lots of browser marketshare every year to keep selling Windows copies to web developers that represent, say, 0.05% of all users? "It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard. That make more sense. And I think you're right with that.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    Well, developers write the applications that the masses use. The strategy is a relic from IE's days as the only significant force in browser marketshare. Microsoft wants you to consider that almost all of your users will be using IE. They want you to see that and then decide that IE is the only browser you can afford to support. And then everyone is stuck with Windows, and it self-perpetuates, because users need IE to go to the websites they like, and then more users are using IE/Windows. You see? That's why IE features are always "broken" and half-implemented. If HTML etc. worked as defined in IE, people could abandon IE at will. IE is still the dominant browser on most sites, so maybe that strategy still has value. It's becoming less and less significant as OS X (which comes with Safari by default) and Firefox gain marketshare. I wonder when they'll decide they need to reconsider; IE has certainly cost them a lot so far, legally.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Have they announced how this is going to work with Windows Phone? Apple (and perhaps Google) seem to be driven by the needs of the phone and then the same features end up in the desktop browser as a consequence, but the last I heard Microsoft was re-writing mobile IE based on IE6, which is frankly mindboggling. edit: Slightly better news straight from the horse's mouth: Andy Lees: We don't support Flash. Performance on Flash is a problem. So we don't do that. We have Internet Explorer. It's halfway between IE7 and IE8 rendering engine. Found via the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Series#Browser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Series#Browser
- youngian 17y ago
  Please be wrong. Please be wrong. Please be wrong.
  - icefox 17y ago
    Why would not supporting flash be bad?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - youngian 17y ago
      This was in reference to the pre-edit version, where he said it was to be based on IE6. In comparison to that prospect, an IE7/8 mishmash is oddly comforting.
      - freddier 17y ago
        It's kinda sad for Win7 Phone. Right now, all the browser innovation is beginning to have its base on mobile devices. I think it's thanks to the webkit implementation on the iPhone that traction for HTML5 has accelerated on the last two years. All modern smartphones have some kind of HTML 5 support and most mobile websites use the iPhone as their main target. So it is sad to see so many good decisions on Win7 Phone going to waste because of really old/legacy technology. I guess it's impossible for Microsoft to use Webkit, politically speaking.
Dav3xor 17y ago
Woohoo! Now I don't have to tear my web game apart for IE support. They were hinting at doing SVG a few months ago, it's nice to see they're stating it officially.
- ryanelkins 17y ago
  As long as you don't plan to release for a few more years I suppose. I mean, people are still using IE 6 today. It will be a while before IE9 1) comes out and 2) is adopted by a large number of users.
  - Dav3xor 17y ago
    Fair enough, but I don't mind making lemonade with my low bandwidth graphics and mapping engine that doesn't require tile reloads on zoom. And it will work on the iPhone/iPad. IE support in a couple years is just icing on the cake.
dhyasama 17y ago
I attended a presentation by Molly Halzschlag at Microsoft Mix a few days ago and she mentioned an interesting factoid. IE6 was going to be the last version because the browser was going to be fully integrated into Windows. We all know that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. So IE development stopped for five full years and lagged FAR behind other browsers.
barnaby 17y ago
Sounds like something I'd like to try out. Will it work on Mac or Linux? Wait, forget I asked.

36 points by kilian 17y ago

"As a developer, you want to know what’s to come in the browsers you and your customers use.... This document instructs you, the Web developer whose customers rely on Internet Explorer, about how to prepare to take advantage of these new enhancements in your websites and applications." It's probably just me, but that sounds awfully presumptuous. Like someone's reminding me that I need IE. Edit: Wow, this thing is full of great little nuggets: "We know you don’t want to have to rewrite and retest your websites again and again; standards adoption by browser vendors is a good way to reach that objective." Hrmm. Really?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

jsdalton 17y ago

Maybe it's naive of me to think this, but why don't they just go all out and announce full support for CSS3? (And HTML5 while they are at it, though I realize the spec is still in flux.) I mean, is rounded borders really the best they can do in 2010? I feel like only a bold move like that would give IE any hope of preventing a further slide into irrelevance.

jasonkester 17y ago
They're in the same damned-if-you-do position they've always been in. Every time they release something that breaks new ground, the "standards" folks move in the other direction and leave them behind. Look at SVG, DOM and CSS for examples where Microsoft moved first, only to see "Standards" written to suit the next version of Netscape's (later Mozilla's) browser. So if they were to implement HTML5 as it stands today, they'd release IE9 to find that the other browsers had coordinated with the W3 to release the final standards alongside FF4 and a new version of Chrome. That's how it worked back when NN6 came out, and how it's worked ever since. It's hard to have sympathy for Microsoft in particular in this area, but that's what they're up against.
- eru 17y ago
  Why do the other guys seem to have an easier time capturing the standards process?
  - jasonkester 17y ago
    In the past, the "other guys" were the driving force behind the standards movement, so they could essentially write the standards as they built their product. They also had reason not to like MS very much (since they were involved in anti-trust litigation at the time), so they did things that in hindsight appear to be simply out of spite. An example of this would be the CSS Box Model, which had reference implementations in both IE and NN at the time the spec was written. The spec changed how width was calculated, leaving every existing browser incompatible, and leading to silly things like Netscape.com not rendering correctly in the first released version of Netscape 6. Nowadays, it's a mystery why MS gets left out of the loop. The standards committees are still non-MS dominated, so conspiricy-theorists could conclude that there's still some collusion between the Mozilla & WebKit teams and the W3. Or it could simply be Microsoft not wanting to get burned yet again.
  - youngian 17y ago
    The knee-jerk answer is that the IE team's ideas often seem to come from a crack pipe. Not to say that every single one of their ideas has been bad, or that everyone else's ideas always turn out great, but IE has a lousy track record. There are more than a few instances where the IE version is either internally inconsistent (many of the IE6 CSS bugs) or provably worse than the competition (JS event handling springs to mind).
    - jasonkester 17y ago
      Ah, but their Box Model is miles faster. Common sense would tell you that knowing an element specified to have a width:100px will actually take up 100px on the screen will speed up rendering. Actual practice shows that it is indeed really fast. There's a reason why Twiddla is so fast on IE. It's because we intentionally leave the Doctype of the whiteboard, thus enabling IE to use its fast Quirksmode rendering engine. Testing showed that adding a Doctype didn't effect FF or Chrome performance at all, but simply slowed IE down to their level.
tvon 17y ago
My guess is that backwards compatibility is much more of an issue for Microsoft, if they implement an in-flux spec then they'll essentially have to keep whatever implementation they come up with regardless of how the spec changes, or face pissing off a lot of enterprisy types.
Silhouette 17y ago
You mock them, but I for one would be glad if a new version of IE supported rounded corners, RGBA colours and SVG. These are useful things where IE lagging behind has caused headaches for web developers for several years now, as we couldn't take advantage of the much easier ways of doing things in most browsers without having to write it all twice for IE anyway. IME, the current trend is that there are still quite a few people using IE6 (the hold-out corporations) but they are dying out. However, a lot of other IE users, perhaps even most of them, do upgrade reasonably quickly now, because there isn't the same incentive to stick with something like IE7. Since users of other browsers also tend to upgrade fairly quickly because everyone has auto-updates these days, I am optimistic that even relatively simple steps like including some CSS3 and SVG in IE9 will make a big and fairly rapid difference in practice to what a web designer can use in production sites.
- jsdalton 17y ago
  I actually wasn't mocking them, and as a web developer I too am happy to hear they are at least providing minimal support for some of these common CSS3 features. I'm also thrilled that they are putting effort into HTML5. I guess I was more looking at it from Microsoft's perspective. Are they serious about competing? If so, merely matching the features that other mainstream browsers have had for some time now isn't going to get them very far. Keep in mind that by the time IE9 is actually released, we'll probably have already seen major version releases from the other players. To me, full CSS3 support and at least an attempt at full HTML5 would be a bold way for IE to jump back into the race as a true leader, not just an also-ran contender.
  - Silhouette 17y ago
    FWIW, I think you're being a little unfair to IE's position in the market as well. Not only does it still command the majority of the browser market by some margin, i.e., outnumbering users of all rival browsers put together, it is also a pretty decent bit of software these days. As one anecdotal contribution, I now know more people who have switched back to IE recently than switched away from it, and these are all technically knowledgeable people who are well aware of the alternatives. They're just fed up of the numerous flaws in the rival browsers and feel they get a better experience with IE8. Looking objectively, it's not hard to see why. Firefox now runs slower than a sleeping tortoise and claims more system resources than Windows Vista on a bad day. Its main strength has always been its plug-in system, but that same system also causes both stability problems and multiple obvious but apparently WONTFIX security and privacy risks. It still runs all tabs under one process, so it is laughably easy to lock up the entire browser and lose anything you were doing on other pages. Chrome has some basic rendering bugs, ironically including CSS3-style rounded corners, which have actually been getting worse in recent versions. And it, too, has its share of privacy concerns for some people, not the least of which is the name "Google" that appears before the "Chrome" part. I don't run Safari myself, but I hear cursing regularly from colleagues who do about pages that simply don't work, so clearly all is not well there either. In comparison, while IE has moved slower than the rest of the browsers, IE8 is already reasonably quick, renders the pages non-geeks read reliably, actually has better tab isolation than anyone else, etc. If IE9 does bring the same kind of performance jump for JS execution and support for the most useful CSS3 features, so it catches up with the recent trends (which, in fairness, only really took off after IE8 was out) then I'll be tempted to switch back myself.

endergen 17y ago

Where the shit is any of the cool stuff. Specifically Canvas, Websockets, Local Storage, etc. I personally find the CSS stuff less interesting as you can do a lot with clever programming to make things look great, but you can't easily emulate local storage(flash storage), canvas(flash) or websockets(comet). (emulation in parentheses, each being excessively complicated for the average developer) Microsoft and Telcos just remind us that technological progress is bad for their personal business, which is so infuriating. (With telcos, it's the whole thing with not just letting app developers and customers do whatever they want with their data plan and apps they use/build.

smackfu 17y ago
Those are all HTML5 features, right? We've gotten into this weird place where the standards are being implemented while they are still in flux because the browser makers are just anxious to add new features.
- tvon 17y ago
  True, but it's a big improvement over browser makers rolling their own solutions.
  - smackfu 17y ago
    How many different version of CSS Gradients are out there now? It seems like they still just roll their own, but now they do it in an "accepted way" by using a prefix like "webkit" or "moz" on their new stuff. It doesn't do much good for the implementers though.
    - tdmackey 17y ago
      http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.html http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.html As you can see CSS3 is very far from being "finalized" so any implementation that mozilla or webkit or someone does is just their best guess at what the final standard will be or experiments to provide recommendation. They leave the prefix free version for when they actually know what it is they are implementing to cause less pain in the long term allowing developers to know full well that what they are using is far from finished.

cookiecaper 17y ago

Microsoft does not want IE to work according to standard and they don't want to provide a full featureset. A lot of smart people work at Microsoft, it's not like they can't figure this out. Microsoft's business strategy involves differentiating IE in basics like rendering and performance so that you have to buy Windows, test your websites in IE, and I think they still hope that they'll return to utter dominance one day. In so doing, they want you to decide that it's only worth your time to support IE since that's what most of your userbase uses anyway, thereby also requiring Windows for the web. They won't support HTML5/Canvas fully until IE13 at this rate. It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard. Microsoft wants Windows to be mandatory for web surfing. That's the goal, that's why IE still exists.

barredo 17y ago
"Microsoft's business strategy involves differentiating IE in basics like rendering and performance so that you have to buy Windows, test your websites in IE" So. Microsoft is losing lots of browser marketshare every year to keep selling Windows copies to web developers that represent, say, 0.05% of all users? "It conflicts with their proprietary Silverlight technology, so any implementation of such in IE is going to be broken and incomplete, as we've come to expect as the standard. That make more sense. And I think you're right with that.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  Well, developers write the applications that the masses use. The strategy is a relic from IE's days as the only significant force in browser marketshare. Microsoft wants you to consider that almost all of your users will be using IE. They want you to see that and then decide that IE is the only browser you can afford to support. And then everyone is stuck with Windows, and it self-perpetuates, because users need IE to go to the websites they like, and then more users are using IE/Windows. You see? That's why IE features are always "broken" and half-implemented. If HTML etc. worked as defined in IE, people could abandon IE at will. IE is still the dominant browser on most sites, so maybe that strategy still has value. It's becoming less and less significant as OS X (which comes with Safari by default) and Firefox gain marketshare. I wonder when they'll decide they need to reconsider; IE has certainly cost them a lot so far, legally.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Have they announced how this is going to work with Windows Phone? Apple (and perhaps Google) seem to be driven by the needs of the phone and then the same features end up in the desktop browser as a consequence, but the last I heard Microsoft was re-writing mobile IE based on IE6, which is frankly mindboggling. edit: Slightly better news straight from the horse's mouth: Andy Lees: We don't support Flash. Performance on Flash is a problem. So we don't do that. We have Internet Explorer. It's halfway between IE7 and IE8 rendering engine. Found via the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Series#Browser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Series#Browser

youngian 17y ago
Please be wrong. Please be wrong. Please be wrong.
- icefox 17y ago
  Why would not supporting flash be bad?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - youngian 17y ago
    This was in reference to the pre-edit version, where he said it was to be based on IE6. In comparison to that prospect, an IE7/8 mishmash is oddly comforting.
    - freddier 17y ago
      It's kinda sad for Win7 Phone. Right now, all the browser innovation is beginning to have its base on mobile devices. I think it's thanks to the webkit implementation on the iPhone that traction for HTML5 has accelerated on the last two years. All modern smartphones have some kind of HTML 5 support and most mobile websites use the iPhone as their main target. So it is sad to see so many good decisions on Win7 Phone going to waste because of really old/legacy technology. I guess it's impossible for Microsoft to use Webkit, politically speaking.

Dav3xor 17y ago

Woohoo! Now I don't have to tear my web game apart for IE support. They were hinting at doing SVG a few months ago, it's nice to see they're stating it officially.

ryanelkins 17y ago
As long as you don't plan to release for a few more years I suppose. I mean, people are still using IE 6 today. It will be a while before IE9 1) comes out and 2) is adopted by a large number of users.
- Dav3xor 17y ago
  Fair enough, but I don't mind making lemonade with my low bandwidth graphics and mapping engine that doesn't require tile reloads on zoom. And it will work on the iPhone/iPad. IE support in a couple years is just icing on the cake.

dhyasama 17y ago

I attended a presentation by Molly Halzschlag at Microsoft Mix a few days ago and she mentioned an interesting factoid. IE6 was going to be the last version because the browser was going to be fully integrated into Windows. We all know that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. So IE development stopped for five full years and lagged FAR behind other browsers.

barnaby 17y ago

Sounds like something I'd like to try out. Will it work on Mac or Linux? Wait, forget I asked.