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IE9 Preview Touts Cross Browser Compatibility
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 development team has announced the availability of the third IE9 platform preview release on the IE blog. Dean Hachamovitch writes, 'The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You'll see more performance, same markup, and hardware-accelerated HTML5.' The announcement focuses on cross-browser compatibility, noting that when 'developers spend less time rewriting their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the Web.' Curiously, however, the video embedded in the page works only in some browsers. Dear Microsoft, IE9 supports many royalty-free, web-compatible formats out of the box (HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, and the like) so why not at least one more?"
Right, so how is a Browser development team working towards cross-browser compatibility? Me thinks it is market speak for "embrace extend extinguish".
IE6 was the last time MS produced a fair browser rather than a poor "web app" delivery platform. Frankly, anything which doesn't work on IE6 probably doesn't need doing at all - I'm sure the content can be delivered without all the fancy effects.
If you're supplying me an app, choose or spec a client-server protocol / set of remote APIs and write a natively compiled client or one in a VM created for a well-engineered language and built to integrate properly with the native environment. That insidious free market will even be able to create competing front-ends so you get to deliver your services with the user's preferred presentation.