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IE9 Scrubs up well against the HTML5 Competition

Microsoft has for years been accused of being shy about standard’s compliance.  For many years they said they could do the web better and, for many years the web went along with it.

Recently though the company has taken a more pragmatic approach and has moved, slowly admittedly, towards full standards compliance.  With their next browser, Internet Explorer 9, they’ve said it will be fully compliant and recent tests from the W3C organisation certainly bear this out.

IE9 HTM5

The figures, reported today by Engadget, put IE9 slightly ahead of the next best browsers for full compliance with the new web standard.  Admittedly the top three browsers are all betas and so we can expect these figures to move, sharply and quickly, but for now it’s an excellent sign.

Internet Explorer has lost significant market share in recent years after the cataclysmic calamity that was IE6 (I try and find stronger and more colourful adjectives every time I mention the god-awful thing).  Now Microsoft are desperate to grab some market share back and, by all accounts, IE9 could do it through a combination of complete standards compliance and new features that people actually want and will use.

We’ll keep you informed about how this picture changes at gHacks.  The new HTML5 browsers are all due out in 2011 and it will be a very interesting year indeed for the web that we’ve all come to know and love.

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About the Author:Mike Halsey is a Microsoft MVP for "Windows Expert". He is also the author of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press and the Windows 7 Power Users Guide, a how-to guide for non-technical Windows users on how to get the best out of Microsoft's new operating system, with step-by-step and quick guides. You can follow Mike on Facebook, Twitter or on his own website The Long Climb

Author: , Tuesday November 2, 2010 -
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Responses so far:

  1. powPOWpow says:

    “The figures, reported today by Engadget, put IE9 slightly ahead of the next best browsers for full compliance with the new web standard.”

    It does NO SUCH THING. Read this:

    http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/ie9-leads-pack-in-html5-support-not-exactly/

    This test says NOTHING about “full compliance.”

  2. hb860 says:

    Agree with first comment
    Results meaning nothing in this case

  3. DZW says:

    Urm.. has anyone run html5test.com on these browsers?
    I know i have
    ie9 = 96 point +5 bonus points
    Chrome 9 (yes 9 not 7) 241 with 13 bonus points
    Out of 300
    IE9 is doing terribly

    • Martin says:

      DZW, there is a difference between all HTML5 features, and those that are part of the official standard.

    • yeahso says:

      Why would anyone run html5test.com? That site doesn’t even test only html5. It doesn’t even test all of it. And scores are assigned very strangely.

      That site needs to be ignored.

  4. Anon says:

    “Today, you can see an early version of the W3C’s Official HTML5 Test Suite Conformance Results on their website. It’s a great example of open and consensus-driven collaboration at work. Anyone can submit tests. The tests are available for public comment. Browser vendors submit their test results for public review. Microsoft has submitted a total of 2853 tests to the W3C across HTML5, CSS3, DOM, SVG, and JavaScript (ECMAScript 5) to date.”
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/10/28/html5-using-the-whole-pc-sixth-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

    Might they be doing so well because most of the tests are ones they wrote, and that they already pass, while ignoring things they don’t support yet? I ran through all the tests the other day on the w3c site, and most are the same tests that have been on the ietestcenter website for some time now.

    Also the image you posted is out of date, they have since updated with the latest builds from each browser. http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

  5. Technology Tutorials says:

    In my previous comment i said that indexOf can only applied to strings, back in the days that was true, but these days in modern browsers you can use Array.indexOf() and for older browsers you can prototype the same behavior into the Array object. So yes, you can use Array.indexOf() but think on support for older browsers.

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