Slashdot Mirror
W3C Says IE9 Is Currently the Most HTML5 Compatible Browser
GIL_Dude writes "The W3C posted results for their latest HTML5 compatibility tests and have found that, so far, IE 9 has the best overall results. 'The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes," "audio," "video," "canvas," "getElementsByClassName," "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5." The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec. Not do they cover CSS or other standards that have nothing to do with HTML5 but are somehow lumped under HTML5 by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.'"
Does slashdot work any better in IE9?
....to Microsoft, for moving in the right direction of adopting standards. I still hate you, Microsoft, but I hate you less.
Now figure out a way to get people to stop using IE6. (maybe an add-on to IE9 that makes it so you can run your ancient IE6 only apps?)
No kidding - place I work has to block Chrome, Safari, and Firefox at the firewall since all three have actively exploited zero-day exploits.
But not IE8. It's secure.
And, yes, they also block all versions of IE prior to 8, because those also have actively exploited holes in them, but if there's one thing Microsoft did right in Vista, it's securing IE. Too bad no other browser maker takes advantages of the OS features used to do that.
IE 9 is currently the most HTML5 compatible browser - but are they only testing the new HTML5 features? How does it do on the HTML4 code that is currently 99% of all the code on the internet?
For all the flak IE gets, it's actually a great browser..
I don't mind IE at all, and use FF daily too. However I much prefer the text rendering of Safari on both PC and Mac
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
the problem is people using standards while they are still being defined.
Did Microsoft just manage to pull an OpenOfficeXML with the HTML5 standard?
Just tried with latest chromium, it passwed all random tests I clicked on, that the tested chrome failed on.
oracle ftp clients are not standard compliant. I know of some other clients that are not standards compatible.
No other browser is limited to Windows.
Dear W3C, there exists a good test for HTML5 already: http://html5test.com/ - use that F*sake.
I stopped clicking through the tests one-by-one when I came across one that would have been fixed by a simple “if (x1 == x2 && y1 == y2) return;”. I went ahead and scrolled down the list, though... for some reason a lot of the tests near the bottom read “No Result” for many/most browsers, and clicking a test at random (canvas(2d.transformation.scale..zero.html)) that said “No Result” in every column except Safari gave me a 404 error.
I’m not terribly impressed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
According to W3Schools, FireFox didn't support XSLT before version 3 and Opera didn't before version 9... But IE 6 supported it.
They're also comparing a development version of a browser to the released versions of other browsers, instead of their development versions. For example, Chromium already passes tests that Chrome failed in the article.
...according to the test developers.
According to wired:
Run IE9 against other aspects of HTML5 and the browser would be decidedly behind its competitors. IE9 lacks support for Web Workers, drag-and-drop features, SVG animations and the File API, all of which are vital components for building useful web applications, and all of which enjoy considerable support in other browsers.
From the coverage of the tests, they seem to be pretty close to the features that were tested in Microsoft's own compliance tests, which were then submitted to the W3C for inclusion in the W3Cs test suite.
To highlight this: see here.
Notice that the only directory here is "Microsoft"?
Actually you can blame that on good old Ballmer. I had lots of friends on hacked XP and they are all running w7 now, Why? Because of the $50 HP upgrade, that's why. Ballmer really shot them in the foot when he pulled the $50 HP upgrade, as there are a ton of late model Athlons and P4s that will be running XP until EOL simply because at the current price it is better to invest in a RAM upgrade than an OS one. I myself have a nice Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM I use for a netbox. It is quiet, compact, uses very little power, and makes a great box for web surfing and downloading. At $50 I probably would have gone ahead and upgraded it, but at $90 it is simply a better investment to get a new Radeon AGP GPU and max out the RAM at 2Gb than it is to buy W7 for it. And don't even get me started on Vista, or as we in the shops call it "WinME: The sequel".
So whether you and Ballmer like it or not XP is "good enough" just like those millions of late model P4s are good enough for what most folks use them for. Ballmer could have used that $50 HP upgrade as a foot in the door to not only gain share back for things like IE and Windows Live, but it would have also gave him a captive market to try to upsell to Pro. Instead he shot himself and his company straight in the foot. That is why I still think the Gate Borg on /. should be replaced by a Ballmer in a beanie with his tongue out wearing an "I Heart Apple!" T-shirt, as that seems to be the current state of management.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As a CSS guy, this means I find other browsers infuriating. Now that we have Webfonts I want to render ever piece of text with fonts instead of graphics...but getting a banner to just the right size is often impossible without a fractional font size. As a normal user ...
As a normal user, I do not want you to have the ability to define exact pixel sizes of fonts, without my ability to override them without completely breaking site layout (which is what will happen if your buttons etc will be designed for a specific size). There are many reasons for why that is the case, but the most obvious one is that I do not want to see tiny, hard-to-read text, and so all my browsers are set up to not allow anything below 13px. Any well-designed website works fine with such an arrangement; if yours does not, I will just go elsewhere.
By the way, one of my personal dislikes with Flash is that there is no way to impose a similar restriction there, and that Flash designers, for some reason, love tiny fonts for menus, buttons and such.
the official claim was that IE8 fully supports CSS 2.1
Unfortunately, the other official claim at the time was that IE prioritizes interoperability over standards compliance, and the two claims together did not jibe. I've encountered far too many instances where IE 8 was correct and the competitors were correct also, except the standard allowed for differences of interpretation and IE 8 alone took different interpretations.
Moreover, IE 8's biggest gaping hole was not its HTML or CSS support, nor even some of its oddities in ECMAScript, but its utterly disfigured DOM implementation, largely unchanged from IE 6 (if not earlier). There are so many analogous-but-slightly-different IEisms in the DOM that huge general-purpose libraries are necessary for most developers to do anything useful on the client-side that isn't missing core features in one implementation or the other.
I haven't seen much from MS about IE 9's DOM improvements, and I'm kind of scared to find out if it's still being hung out to dry. My hope is that, while their public projection of "HTML5" is far too broad to be meaningful, their internal priority does include true HTML5 compliance, which will standardize the DOM.