First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to be finalised. And yes, these tests cover only a portion …
A bit odd in any case. I wonder if these are the tests submitted by Microsoft? Not heard of "foreigncontent" before in my readings about HTML5. Looking cursorily at the spec this I guess that this might have something to do with the contenteditable stuff which MS invented. I may very well be wrong.
Anyway I ran the tests on Opera 11 - there are some 404s in there but I the form to submit the results is broken: it is just a textarea with neither form action or button.
The tests are heavily skewed towards canvas with other stuff such as <time> not getting a look in. Still, even with these obvious deficiencies it will be nice to have a set of standard tests to measure some of the bluster by.
Ummmmm like some other genius pointed out....
It's crap and insecure browser - runs on a crap and insecure OS.... and won't run on all OS's.... and every new MS OS requires a huge computer upgrade and a doubling of the household electricity bill - and the OS is generally full of dumb and useless "upgrades and innovations".....
To be frank..... I don't fucking care what MS does....
To be a cycnical arsehole - I bet they tested a stripped down version to even get it to open a webpage in under an hour.
Whichever Microsoft products don't respond to customers' needs. No mystery here. When Microsoft implicitly tells a portion of the market to FOAD, they get backtalk.
The "Microsoft haters" hated what Microsoft didn't do, beneficial things that is. When Microsoft makes people's lives harder, the 'hate' gets vocal. No mystery here.
If you don't see a complete instant reversal of opinion about Microsoft, well, they have rather a backlog of instances of not responding... No surprise there, eh?
"The fact that it is still insecure because of it's very nature of being integrated into the OS?"
You can't say that about IE9, it won't even run on the older OS versions that had that integration.
That one's so dead it's unbelievable and has been for some time. You have to be a dyed in the wool MS-hater with abso-fucking-lutely no technical knowledge whatsoever to trot that old chestnut out.
AFAIK, the only OS / browser combo you can legitimately levy that particular criticism against these days is Chrome / ChromeOS......
People who dislike and mistrust MS do so for good reasons. The company has
1. A history of back-stabbing "partners"
2. They really don't compete, they wall in their users and wall-out the competition (much as the Jobsian Co. now does). i.e. When all you can buy is a Lada then a Lada is the best car to buy. In the case of the Jobsians substitute "Lada" with "Cadillac".
3. They were (are still for the most part) resting on their O/S/ monopoly laurels (see #2).
I for one, while firmly in the "don't do business with/trust Microsoft" camp, applaud their coming to the fore and meeting the challenge of HTML5. Good Job M$! Now, lets see them move out of their comfort-zone and make their browser equally functional and available across all platforms. Show the world that you can compete. If they actually rise to that challenge then they are starting to change their mindset. When people can download and install the Big Blue 'e' and run it on their *NIX box with all the same functionality of running it on Win [XP/Vista/7] then Microsoft will truly be starting to compete in the software marketplace.
Now here's where my mistrust of M$ comes in. My best guess is that M$ is exerting a huge effort in IE standards compliance because that is where the spotlight is, and it is where they have been loosing large chunks of market share. To stop the slide they need to get Windows users to stop looking at the grass on the other side of the fence.
This test does NOT show that MS is more compliant. All it shows is that Microsoft passes its own tests, which is just a few tests.
That's right. Microsoft submitted these tests, and ensured that it was better at the tests Microsoft themselves created.
You just fell for Microsoft's marketing BS again.
Reality. It is important to make sure IE also complies with <a href="http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/internet-explorer-9-bad-news/">CSS, SVG, and HTML 1-4</a>. When you ignore these things, what you get looks like <a href="http://techrights.org/2010/10/16/acid-test-and-winphone7/">Windows 7 Mobile does</a>.
Expecting Microsoft to do anything but promote themselves at your expense is as foolish as expecting their "privacy settings" to work. Is that really a company that should have a seat on the W3C board?
Windows Phone 7 unexpectedly looking like it might just be half decent? WTF?
Internet Explorer 9 conforming to standards, being clever with hardware acceleration, etc? WTF??
Windows 7 actually doing some useful things and perhaps asking hard-ish questions of OSX? WTF??
Windows beginning to become too hard to hack prompting attackers to look elsewhere? WTF??
Have I slipped in to a parallel universe, or are we seeing the results of commercial competition?
..................that "there is more joy in heaven at one sinner that repenteth than in nine and ninety just men". Verily, even when that sinner is a large tech company. Let us all rise and......
Apart from wishing to express my disappointment that we do not have a techie vicar icon I have to say that I am pretty amazed as well. We see of course that there are several contributions from those who are persuaded that we need reminding of the (admittedly lengthy and to a considerable extent, justified) charge-sheet against MS. They are mistaken. It is for many of us precisely because of MS' previous form that we are fairly amazed by these few but nonetheless interesting and positive straws in the techno-wind. I am _way_ to old to be anybody's fanboi and I left naivete behind several decades ago. I therefore simply express a pious hope that these aforementioned straws indicate that MS has actually developed sufficient corporate intelligence to have at any rate begun to understand the concept _constructive_ self-interest.
The icon? I just thought that my posting needed something a little bit surreal to match the feelings of incredulity that some of us are experiencing.
People moaned for years about the state of IE, saying there was no excuse for a company with MS's resources not to be able to knock up 6 compliant browsers before breakfast.
Well now the browser you was demanding is here whilst Firefox is throwing paper aeroplanes, doodling on its exercise books and making fart noises at the back of the class. Happy now?
No, didn't think so...
And what do they mean by 'no results' in the getElementsByClassName test? Opera and Safari support that.
Do the poor 'foreign content' results mean those companies are xenophobic?
All very true.
However, it's one thing when a company as old and diverse as MS end up with a lazy browser. Another completely when a company as new as Mozilla Corp who, for all intents and purposes, only make one highly focussed product, become so lazy so quickly.
Firefox is only a mere 5 years old, and for it to be in its current state behind literally all the others means they must have been lazily failing to develop it properly for more of those years than not.
I agree, it's good - not to mention highly ironic - that Microsoft have highlighted just how tired and rusty Firefox is, and in so doing will hopefully apply the pressure needed to trigger a shake-up in Mozilla management and start developing a competitive browser again.
The problem is, it's no longer a two-horse race. Things will be harder for them this time, especially without the bestowed popularity that comes with being the new kid on the block.
I really think that if Google had any desire to sink Firefox, they only have to wait a little while longer and then cripple their life support revenue stream to it. There's no law that says they have to single handedly prop up a rival commercial company (especially when it's only one of many). It just depends whether Google actually want to get rid of at least one browser from the marketplace to free up more share for themselves and those who remain.
Even if all browsers support all the same standards perfectly so that there's no difference in rendering or speed on any website or widget, the browser companies still need large market shares to generate profits. There will always be browser wars, probably with two main rivals and the rest scattered around the periphery.
I don't really get the memory-hogging complaints, unless your system has <1GB RAM?
Personally, I'd rather have a performant browser with 10 - 20 tabs take as much memory as it needs to (I have a 3GB system, though) and let it be swapped out if I decide to bring up TF2 and leave it in the background.
I jump between the Firefox 4 beta and Iron (non-Google branch of Chrome) pretty frequently. I have lots of extensions in Fx for web development that I miss in Iron/Chrome, but Iron/Chrome is just so much better at being swapped out of RAM and then continuing as though everything's alright (possibly due to the many-process aproach).
Chrome certainly isn't that much lighter on memory than my Fx instance, if you add up all the processes, but it performs so much faster.
Of course, this is ignoring the old memory leaks Fx used to suffer from - I haven't noticed anything obvious in Fx 4, so lets hope they're history.
They seem to be hell bent on producing a decent standards-compliant browser just to prove they could, to themselves probably.
The reasons they made IE the dominant force in internet browsing no longer make much sense, but they plough madly on, like some eccentric inventor in their shed, desperate to prove to the world that 'we coulda done it, see?!'
Good on them for taking the fight to Chrome, Opera, Safari and the increasingly wayward Firefox but guys, c'mon, you're not going to make your next $Billion making people love your browser in 2010.
What's that you say? IE9 a trojan horse for Silverlight to take over the world? Oooooh kaaaaay *reaches for sedative hypodermic*
"Good on them for taking the fight to Chrome, Opera, Safari and the increasingly wayward Firefox but guys, c'mon, you're not going to make your next $Billion making people love your browser in 2010."
Don't be an idiot. The new all-signing all-dancing browser ONLY runs on their latest proprietary platforms. Not so much Platform 9 as 1.5 Platforms.
By selling the browser *hard*, and that includes all the fanfare that standards-wise it's "better" than the competition, they hope to get more converts to the questionable OS it runs in.
Cheers for the ad hominem attack :)
So it's about the OS, eh? OK then, exactly how many diehard Linux/Mac users do you reckon would change their *entire operating system* just to be able to use a browser which may or may not be slightly faster/slower in benchmarks, or slightly more/less standard compliant?
Saying "don't be an idiot" isn't an ad hominem attack. Check your definitions - you'll sound more intelligent if you don't misuse its meaning in a logical debate. And don't be an idiot. :-)
Regarding the case in point - the growing trend for the web browser to be central to apps and the cloud vision that Microsoft, Google and others are pumping out, I believe that yes, there will be innumerable cases where the quality of the browser will be the deciding factor in which OS to go with, after all the OS is being marginalised by the very same visionaries. Not among the diehards obviously, but let's not ignore the fact that the vast majority of computer users aren't diehards.
"Well now the browser you was demanding is here whilst Firefox is throwing paper aeroplanes, doodling on its exercise books and making fart noises at the back of the class. Happy now?"
That'd be the Firefox that came 3rd out of the 5 majors, then? And both IE and FF in that test were pre-release. Quit pretending like Firefox aren't doing development when we get an article on El Reg every other week about the latest FF4 build.
With MS being the poster child for bloat-ware, what are the new hardware specs to be?
Imagine the size of their creation if they try to make it an OS and desktop combination!
I get the feeling Joe Q Public is the guinea-pig rather the beneficiary of all these browser activity with the hardware guys standing by to make a killing.
I thought it was usual practice to develop a standard, publish it and then have product made. Wonder if a little MS SOP trickery can be seen at work here?
All this gigabytes talk about browser size got me worried so I took a look.
My IE9 folder just under .013 gigabytes (for both x86 and x64 versions) and my FireFox 4 (x86) folder is just under .027 gigabytes and my Google Chrome (x86) folder is .354 gigabytes! At this rate better get a larger hard drive!
Yes, I know that IE is larger than that because there a components in the Window folder as well...
As for hardware requirements, I have to agree, how dare these browser makers use my graphics card advanced features. The only apps that should use the abilities of my graphics cards are games, any apps that isn't a game is using resources that I just can't spare!
Whereas everything of Chrome and Firefox is in their respective folders.
All the guts of IE are in various 'core' Windows libraries. This goes back to when they were trying to avoid being done for abusing their monopoly in the OS market to extend into other markets, a tactic that pretty much worked.
(IEFRAME.DLL in System32 is 0.010 GB, which alone takes IE up to 0.023 GB before you even look for any of the other ones.)
@mafoo, @JaitcH
Who cares about memory footprint and HDD space in the days of TB hard drives and GBs of memory? I downloaded IE9 beta. It's a 35MB file. Larger than FF for sure, but not much of an issue for 1TB hard disk. But it runs quicker than IE8 and not much different to FF. I am not talking about benchmarks here. I am talking about my perception - ie what a user actually sees.
But anyway, your clutching at straws. MS have finally release a solid, standards compliant browser comparable to all the other browsers and now you want to mark them down on memory footprint? Does my granny care about that or even what it is?
For years people have been complaining (me too) that Microsoft didn't do it right and yet when they do do it right we only hear they didn't do it right in the past. True, but they seem on the right path (for whatever motive) and that ought to be applauded; it's what everyone has been demanding.
Some people will never accept Microsoft, never forget, always hold the past against them. They won't be happy unless Redmond and the collective board the Ark-B and sail into the Sun. I'm more interested in what Microsoft do now and in the future.
I guess Microsoft taking the lead and doing it properly is too much for some to stomach.
"Don't mention the war! I did but I think I got away with it".
I try not to be cynical and a standards compliant browser from MS can only be a good thing but this is only testing conformance to HTML5 standards - which as the article states aren't standard yet.
This does not cover CSS, JS or the DOM (and manipulating the DOM through JS of course), without which a web document (HTML) is basically just a browser compatible .odt - actually less since the HTML should just deal with the semantics with the CSS as the presentation layer.
Still - it looks like there is a light at the end of the tunnel - I just hope it's not the proverbial oncoming train.
That's the current downfall of firefox. Yes, it does its job pretty well out of the box and what it doesn't do can be sorted with extensions. But it comes with a hefty and excruciatingly s-l-o-o-o-o-w startup which surely isn't necessary if you save the program state properly on shutdown and resume from there rather than reading everything afresh every time.
Oddly enough both Opera and Internet Explorer (8) take much longer to load (from cold) than Firefox (with several extensions) on my PC at home. Though my home PC is a Windows 7 (x64) box with 6 gigs of RAM so "slow" is somewhat relative.
Though on the XP system at work, Firefox (with the same extensions) is far slower than Opera to boot.
Standards evolve at a frantic pace, with a lot of the spec being written in retrospect to accommodate progressive browser implementations. While the Webkit and Gecko teams work iteratively in an environment of rapid development, IE versioning has always come in disparate version releases which do not upgrade gracefully rather than feature-laden optimisations in the form of point-releases. If IE9 wants to stay ahead of the game, Microsoft would need to fundamentally change the way the IE team works — but the cost & security issues of core MS product uptake make such a model difficult to implement.
In the meantime, check out IE9's CSS3 support — abysmal!
So where do I click to download the Linux version?....
IMO a decent browser is OS agnostic so I don't have to choose my OS to choose my browser. Great news though and a past IE hater, i'm actually quite enthusiastic about the idea of a compliant browser for the majority web users... here's hoping for no more ugly IE fix hacks in my web coding.
... as long as you're prepared to upgrade from XP to Windows 7.
Realistically, Microsoft's decision to not make IE9 compatible with XP (for largely spurious or contrived reasons) means that for at least another couple or years, possibly a good deal longer, the browser market will become more fragmented than ever.
@ian yates, bloated is bloated, whether you've got 512MB of 6GB of RAM, if something uses more RAM than it should it's bloated. Personally i haven't had problems with browser bloat on even a 512MB system but it's bigger than it should be.
I'm with the Microsoft guy on one point. It pains me to agree w/ ms, but saying html and css have nothing to do with each other is taking the piss, when html pages use css to affect page layout.
... ultimately, a fail.
Due to Microsofts still dominant *desktop* market share, they can get away with platform dependence ... for now.
Or will we continue to suffer from fragmentation, on, what was ultimately *supposed* to be a set of standards?
I fear so - this move by microsoft is more than likely another 'dominate' strategy - they lost ground way back when with earlier versions of internet explorer, then came out with Internet Explorer 4, which, to all intents and purposes, killed Netscape, to such a degree, that they held sway in the browser market until Mozilla rose from the ashes of Netscape.
Fragmentation seems to be a human condition - a set of standards will always be interpreted - it keeps me in a job, so I can't moan too much ....
Anyone reporting this Microsoft or stunt as news. What Microsoft have done here is submitted test cases known to work in ie9 and fail in other browsers. A big or stunt this is.
For example, Opera gets 0% in the SVG tests, despite having the highest SVG support of any browser. The reason is because the SVG tests don't use XHTML5 - there are at least 7 other tests in the suite that do use XHTML5 (all of which IE9 happens to get 100% in), but none of the SVG ones do, causing Opera's 0% scor
Forget it IT-heretics, others do things with their Windows 7/IE9 that you can only dream while sleeping hugging your linux box with half-baked-software such as Opera and the rest of them. It's not mobile toy that you confuse for a business/gaming/personal computer, you have to actually compete on PC market and invest, invest and invest into tools, processes, engineers, methodologies, standards and so on, an arms race your open-source buddies simply won't sustain. Period. Study history of modern software which is ironically a history of Microsoft, like it or not.
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