Internet Explorer 9

[Doctor Q]

I read that that the beta of Internet Explorer 9 is now out, including "broader support for Web standards including HTML5 and CSS 3."

I'm wondering what it's going to mean to those of us who maintain websites with a lot of css and Javascript, and who try to keep them compatible with the most common web browsers.

Has anyone read enough technical details yet to know whether the changes are going to make life easier, or where they might trip us up?

 

[chrmjenkins]

Public beta for now. Scored 96/100 on Acid3, so hopefully a little more standards compliant.

 

[Cabbit]

From my limited testing it means if you build a site and test it with Safari its most likely going to look practically the same on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and IE9.

Only annoying part still is the browser prefixes for CSS3 that just add unnecessary work.

Of course your nice HTML5 and CSS3 website is not going to work well at all in <IE9 so you'll need ether a legacy version or lots of javascript.

 

[angelwatt]

Hopefully, it'll mean less IE-specific hacks needed for this version and on. Depending on how you're currently "accommodating" IE it may not be a big impact to a sites approach. If you're using conditional comment and actually check based on version, then things should move forward smoothly, including JavaScript-based checks. IE9 will make things easier for designers and developers, but unfortunately it will not be adopted for a few years due to system requirements.

Some JavaScript libraries may be negatively impacted, but the better written ones should handle it well. I'm not sure which ones may fall victim as I don't use any. If scripts make decisions based on what it detects the browser is capable of doing rather than just checking if it's IE, then they should be fine as well.

One thing that will keep IE9 from being adopted by IE users is that it requires Windows Vista SP2 or newer apparently. That leaves a whole lot of XP users out in the cold. That's a lot of companies like my own unable to use a decent version of IE. XP makes up about 70% of the OS market, so IE9 won't be very available to many people for a while.