Will Internet Explorer 9 Melt the Hearts of Web Developers?

The famous Internet Explorer browser is going to conquer the land of unbelievable opportunities, and after the years of roaming Microsoft’s offspring is about to prove its craft (well, at least that's what we're being told).

It is a well-known fact that starting from version 6 Internet Explorer was a real headache for the web developers. The Ninth IE is about to break that stereotype by implementing support for such major web technologies as CSS3 and HTML5.

The current situation with IE9 beta version makes us think that the expectations and hopes of web developers have finally been heard. Even though CSS3 and HTML5 are in the unofficial status so far we must admit that these two standards are in the forefront of web development today. Experienced developers know what it is like to surprise clients with new awesome stuff created by simple and spectacular solutions due to CSS3/HTML5 awesome functionality.

Actually Microsoft’s team of IE developers has faced a real challenge because major web browsers already support over 95% of HTML5 and CSS3 features. And the current goal for IE team is how to convince huge community of people whose work is to create the future of the web that IE9 is a totally new product that has managed to get rid of its inglorious past habits and has grown some “muscles”.

CSS3 features supported by IE9

• @font-face
• @media
• RGBA colors
• HSL colors
• HSLA colors
• box-sizing
• opacity
• background-size
• multiple background
• background-clip
• background-origin
• overflow-x
• overflow-y
• writing-mode
• wiring-mode
• word-wrap
• box-shadow
• border-radius
• transforms

This is a pretty impressive list comparing to what we've seen in IE8 but we must get back to the problems that loom at the horizon of the IE9 success.

Lack of support for pseudo classes (only 50% are supported) and problems with the transitions, gradients and border-image might cause sceptical reaction from some experienced web developers because it would be reasonable to work with browser that provides more performance. Among the other none-supported features we should mark out outline-offset, resizing and multiple columns.

IE9 to HTML5: Are we friends now?

While a broad web audience was thrilled with the news about IE9 supporting the "canvas" tag along with such awesome new HTML5 tags as “audio”, “video”, “header”, “footer” etc, other important and prospective technologies for some reason haven’t received a notable support from Microsoft. We can’t blame developers for this because it is a very complicated mission to accomplish all at once without having a decent basis (frequent Chrome releases policy is a great example for this trend). Now if we get back to the HTML5 elements support, another important thing here is that such elements as “embed”, “summary”, “menu” and “command” are also out of the supported list. At first glance IE9 does a pretty good job in this field and those none-supported elements are not one of those “heavyweights” that would have huge influence on the browser’s performance.

Instead of Happy Ending

While IE competitors keep growing muscles with new releases and rejoicing their statuses of being popular among the web developer community, IE strikes with a pretty good piece of new functionality and great features support. However if you dig deeper than it would be obvious that the current status is not enough for web developers. IE updates its releases really slowly and every time the team is only trying to catch up with the rivals. Besides, IE9 still doesn’t support such great technologies as MathML, WebSocket, Web Workers, Geolocation API and offline web applications; these technologies are not really new but they're HTML5-related so you can’t promise much without the presence of all these in your arsenal.

But we have to give IE9 a credit - this launch is a huge step forward because finally Microsoft decided to do something useful both for front-end users and developers. So it's a good something to start with. IE9 now is in beta mode and we believe that it would eventually become a good modern browser that will satisfy users’ expectations and will convince web developers to reconsider its attitude to this brand. As always we are glad to discuss this topic with you in our comments section and please let us know if there's something we've missed.