Mozilla's "Modern Browser" Attack On IE Overlooks Firefox Shortcomings
Does IE9 support 99% of the HTML5 specification as insinuated by Microsoft?
Microsoft and Mozilla traded barbs in a dispute over what constitutes a "modern" Web browser. The competitive friction is starting to heat up because the Redmond software giant and Silicon Valley nonprofit are preparing to release the next major versions of their respective Web browsers.
Mozilla's Firefox 4 VS Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9
Mozilla's Firefox 4 is expected to arrive this month and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is in the release candidate stage. Both browsers are set to introduce a significant number of new features for end users and Web developers, including extensive support for critical next-generation Web standards.
Mozilla developer Paul Rouget, who is probably best known for his innovative HTML 5 demos, issued a statement and accompanying infographic that attacks Microsoft's claims regarding IE9's support for modern Web standards. Rouget says that Microsoft has misrepresented the extent of IE's standards compliance by using the company's own test suite as a benchmark rather than vendor-neutral tests devised by the W3C and other independent parties.
Microsoft's recent blog entry about the availability of the IE9 release candidate includes a table that purports to compare IE9's standards compliance against that of stable versions of other mainstream browsers. As Rouget has pointed out, the table is based solely on Microsoft's own test cases and omits prerelease versions of other browsers.
Standards bearer
The standards story itself is also far from clear. When Mozilla was defending its poor score on the Acid 3 test in 2008, Mozilla's Rob Sayre decried what he called standards "grandstanding" by browser vendors. As was the case then, evaluating standards compliance is a task that requires a lot more nuance than you can get from tables, infographics, and test scores. Microsoft still has a lot of work to do, but they are finally moving forward at a good pace and have arguably caught up with a big chunk of the feature set that Web developers want to use today.
Rouget provides an abridged list of some of the standard where Microsoft has fallen behind. Perusing the list proved to be an instructive exercise. Many of the standards that Rouget identifies as missing pieces in IE9 are indeed unfortunate omissions by Microsoft. Some nascent features that Microsoft doesn't support yet, like Web Workers, are going to be important for high-performance next-generation Web applications.
SMIL is one of only two missing IE9 features that prevent the browser from scoring 100/100 on the Acid 3 test. The other major feature is SVG Fonts, which Mozilla has also declined to implement, due to the availability of the superior WOFF standard.
What makes a modern browser?
The question of what constitutes a "modern" browser seems to tread into the shaky realm of ontological inquiry. In a response to Mozilla, Microsoft's Tim Sneath accuses Rouget of assuming a "very narrow definition" of what makes a browser modern.
There are a lot of ways in which IE is arguably more "modern" than Firefox if you look beyond the issue of standards. The most noteworthy example is IE's support for process isolation for tabs. Although a number of mainstream browsers support this capability, it's not supported yet in Firefox 4. Mozilla's 2011 roadmap highlights tab process isolation as a major goal and indicates that it could come later in 2011.
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