Microsoft Previews IE9 With HTML5 And SVG Support

With a stated love for web standards such as HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 3 and Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG), Microsoft has released a Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, the next version of its browser, which promises to be more interoperable than ever.

At an IE9 Test Drive event on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, the software giant laid out its strategy for helping developers create the next generation of web applications by delivering a new standards-based browser and by taking advantage of hardware innovations, among other things.

Microsoft touts HTML5

At the event, which took place on 11 March, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft said Microsoft’s goal is to enable developers to use the same CSS, HTML and other web technologies to take advantage of PC hardware.

And at the MIX 2010 conference here, Microsoft unveiled its IE9 Platform Preview to the astonishment of naysayers who have doubted Microsoft’s sincerity when it comes to standards. Yet, the IE9 Test Drive might have been called an HTML5 love fest.

“In a nutshell, we love HTML5,” Hachamovitch said. “We love it so much we want it to actually work.” However, Hachamovitch also said he believes there are two definitions of HTML5. One is the specification itself. The other is that “HTML5 has taken on an aura – sort of like Web 2.0.”

Essentially, Hachamovitch said developers want to be able to write a markup once and have it run the same in multiple places. “It’s like USB,” he said. “You don’t want ‘USB left’ or ‘USB right;’ you just want it to work.”

Rob Mauceri, principal group program manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, said, “When we started planning IE9, one of the first things we did was look at HTML5. We knew we were moving from the world of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L) to the next generation of HTML5 apps.”

Overall, Microsoft’s goal with IE9 was three-fold to produce a browser that supported the “best interoperable HTML5 so the same markup can be used everywhere,” to deliver hardware-accelerated graphics and to deliver a high-performance browser. With IE9, Microsoft says it is delivering on all three goals. Indeed, Jason Weber, principal program manager lead for Internet Explorer, whose job it is to focus on the browser’s performance, said even the IE9 Platform preview is “scary fast.”

John Hrvatin, senior program manager lead for Internet Explorer said the “same markup” theme has become the rally cry for the team because “we want to use the same HTML, same CSS, and same JavaScript and have it work across browsers.”

A competitor to Silverlight?

Meanwhile, Mauceri said the IE team is trying to bring a lot of capability into the browser without requiring a plug-in. Of course, that sentiment prompted questions of whether IE with its support for HTML5 might stand as competition to Microsoft’s Silverlight Rich Internet Application plug-in technology.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live at Microsoft addressed that question. “You’ve got the HTML5 standards work in process and we’re supporting that,” he said. “And there’s a whole world of plug-ins and Silverlight is part of that, like Adobe has with Flash. I tend not to think of it as one technology replacing another or being competitive with another.”

At MIX 2010 Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst with Ovum, echoed Sinofsky. “Well, Scott Guthrie [Microsoft corporate vice president] said Silverlight is approaching the point where it’s on 60 percent of all Internet-connected devices,” Yarmis said. “But HTML5 will be the 90-plus percent solution. So as long as they keep Silverlight out in front of the spec, I don’t see there being a problem with competition or cannibalisation.”

Yet, Mauceri acknowledges that even the implementations of a specification can vary between IE, Google’s Chrome, Firefox, Safari and other browsers. Moreover, “when you implement ahead of the spec you can break things,” he said. However, “the key is with HTML5 we think the time is right,” he said. “We think it’s mature enough to start working on this stuff.”