Info Pioneer

Microsoft's development direction of Internet Explorer 9 is unambiguous: implementing HTML5 Web standards is the name of the game, with the intent of letting developers use the "same markup" to work everywhere. As IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said at MIX10 this week, "We love HTML5 so much we actually want it to work." Redmond is targeting real-world applications based on real-world data. For example, every single JavaScript and DOM API used by the top 7,000 websites was recorded. IE9 will deliver support for every API used by those sites. That obviously gives rise to a chicken-and-egg situation—what about the APIs that developers can't currently use because of a lack of widespread support, but would like to? Beyond the top 7,000 data, Microsoft has a number of HTML5 usage scenarios that it's targeting. The company has not said much on what those scenarios are, but given the demonstrations of HTML5 video and SVG animation, it seems that these are...

The software giant released a public sneak peek of its newest browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), aimed at web developers and the technically brave of heart. Microsoft’s new browser, which won’t be available for at least a year, will support HTML5, a new web protocol which makes it possible to play videos and other embedded content on web pages without the need for a specialist plug-in, such as Adobe Flash. It will also offer enhanced support for CSS3 and an improved JavaScript Engine. Although the browser is in such an early stage of development that it cannot even be called a “beta version”, it is possible to download the platform preview to see demonstrations of the new features. “The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases,” said Dean Hachamovich, the browser team’s general manager, in a statement issued today before he took the stage at MIX10, Microsoft’s web developer conference, to publicly launch IE9. Hachamovich pro...