Microsoft started work on IE 9 and is planning to give web developers what they want

According to Dean Hachamovitch in the announcement on IE Blog:

Our focus is providing rich capabilities – the ones that most developers want to use – in an interoperable way.  Developers want more capabilities in the browser to build great apps and experiences; they want them to work in an interoperable way so they don’t have to re-write and re-test their sites again and again. The standards process offers a good means to that end.

Apart from support for border-radius and a big speed up for the JavaScript engine, Microsoft did not announce any specific features. They did not make any promises to support HTML5 features such as video and canvas, but they did mention the Acid3 test as one of the areas they would work on. Again no promises that IE 9 would pass the Acid3 test, just that its score will continue to go up during the development.

Things are also looking good for a pet peeve of mine: CSS selector support. A couple of years ago I created an automated test suite for the CSS3.info website that would test support of almost all CSS selected in the CSS2.1 and CSS3 spec. At the time no browser passed the test, but that quickly changed and nowadays every browser except for Internet Explorer passes. IE 8 did improve the score quite a bit and added all of the CSS2.1 selectors. Work on the CSS selector engine in IE9 is apparently already almost finished, because the announcement on the IE Blog includes a screenshot of my test suite and clearly shows that it fails only 4 tests of the 578. It supports 43 of the 41 selectors, one is buggy and just one is unsupported.

Update:

The CSS Selector test is also mentioned in a MSDN Channel 9 video about IE 9: Standards and Interoperability.

Wednesday, 18 November 2009