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Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars
Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."
First off if this is a technical discussion, we should probably be talking about layout engines -- not browsers. Secondly their HTML5 capabilities are well documented. You can come up with whatever perventage you want from those charts as some things (Video) might be deal breakers compared to others (MathML).
My work here is dung.
...that they benchmarked IE trunk against OLD versions of other browsers. They didn't even use Chrome 5.0!
In some places it's a significant difference.
I also did some benchmarks of my own on non-Microsoft controlled sites. See the first comment on that page for results. Suffice it to say IE9 has improved since IE8 but still has a ways to go.
Wait, what? No Windows Service Pack has ever forced an update of Internet Explorer; maybe NT 4.0 did as I can't remember that far back, but definitely nothing since Windows 2000 onwards. Windows XP SP3 will install fine with IE 6.0 (XP bundled version). They'd be breaking their own support policy by even doing so, as Microsoft commits to supporting the version of IE that is shipped with every Windows version for the lifetime of support for that OS release. Seriously, where do you trolls get your garbage? You're not picking exceptions, you're claiming shit that has never happened.
Bad software.
The reason why most tests failed with browsers other than IE:
1st) Since HTML5 is still in a very early state, many browsers (AKA Webkit, Gecko, Presto) used prefixes for most tags and CSS properties. Example: round borders is -moz-border-radius in gecko, and -webkit-border-radius in Chrome. Some latest versions have taken some out of beta and also read border-radius, but most still don't. IE obviously uses border-radius, and that's why other's don't work. ... except they are not, because they use HTML5 styles and tags, and they do not validate. Validator says: The document located at was tentatively checked as XHTML 1.0 Strict. This means that with the use of some fallback or override mechanism, we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML, HTML5 and/or XML Parser(s). In other words, the document would validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict if you changed the markup to match the changes we have performed automatically, but it will not be valid until you make these changes.
2nd) The JS is tricky at best. Go and check it out. Lots of lines of code to perform a simple task, and those lines are carefully selected to fail in other browsers. I downloaded the tests, and they work on ALL browsers (I tested Chrome, Firefox and Opera, all on GNU/Linux, all on their latest version). That JS was crafted to fail on all browsers and work only on IE
3rd) I took the time to run the source of many of their scripts through the W3C validator. Most scripts have several warnings, some errors, etc. They DO NOT VALIDATE.
4th) The tests aren't really HTML5. Only the HTML5 tests are actual HTML5, the others are XHTML 1.0 strict
It's microsoft ... never forget about that. This is business as usual.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?