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Rivals Mock Microsoft's 'Native HTML5' Claims
CWmike writes "Mozilla and Opera are mocking browser rival Microsoft's use of the term 'native HTML5' to describe Internet Explorer 9 and the in-development IE10 as an oxymoron, an attempt to hijack an open standard and a marketing ploy. On Tuesday, Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, the executive who runs the IE group, used the term several times during a keynote at MIX, the company's annual Web developers conference, and in an accompanying post on the IE blog. Hachamovitch claimed in his keynote that, 'The only native experience of the Web of HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.' Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, replied mockingly in Bugzilla: 'I'm pretty sure Firefox 5 has "complete native HTML5" support. We should resolve this as fixed and be sure to let the world know we beat Microsoft to shipping *complete* native HTML5.'"
Whether it's proper use (whatever that means) of the term "native HTML5" or not, what Microsoft is implying is that their browser is the only one that runs HTML5 (specifically some of the graphics and video layers) directly on top of Windows Vista/7 graphical subsystems tied directly to hardware. I'm sure it employs technologies like WPF, DirectX, and so on. The competitors (Mozilla, Opera, Google, and Apple) support hardware acceleration, but they do it their own way--almost like they "hacked together" support for true hardware acceleration. Firefox and Chrome's rendering of complex 3D scenes is still jerky and relatively slow *especially* compared to IE. I've also noticed that Firefox's live preview renderings (for parts of Aero) are absolutely awful. They might as well not even exist at all. I'm not really an IE user, but I have to give kudos to Microsoft for the raw performance of IE 9 and 10. It really takes advantage of modern hardware. Other browser vendors should stop mocking and take some solid notes.