Comic Update: IE Nine Means Business
Posted by Kyle Weems on March 22, 2010Today’s comic features Internet Explorer 9. Well, it features that browser if it existed as a tough-as-nails video-game playing entity in the world of Tron. The theme of today’s jaunt owes itself to the gorgeous new trailers for Tron Legacy. I used to think every geek worth their salt had seen the original movie in this franchise, but recently learned at least three of my co-workers at Mindfly have gone their whole lives without witnessing the amazing light-cycle battles and disc duels.
As a result, I now live in a world where everything I’ve taken for granted is flipped upside down. I need to make a rental and rectify the situation.
The rest of the comic owes itself to the cornucopia of information now flooding the web tubes about IE9, starting at SXSW and running over us like a tsunami from Redmond. The IE team’s blog is a pipe filled with revelations. Drink from it. HTML5 support including <video>? Check. Prettier typography? Check. SVG? Check. Way faster JavaScript? Check. Adding support for some CSS3? (Note the word “some”, folks. The concept of complete “CSS3 Support” is a myth.)
What the heck is going on? If there was one thing we could rely on as website creators, it was that the Big Blue E was a drunken frat boy knocking over the furniture, throwing up on the carpet, and generally making a mess of any tidy rooms you designed. Yet, version Nine Point Oh is not only helping wash away the stink of earlier failures (like Eight’s noble attempts at correcting the errors of Six and Seven), but rather pushing aggressively forward to be off the bench and in the game with other “modern browsers.”
I guess we’ll all have to accept the truth: Microsoft is not in fact a bunch of blithering idiots. Having met several of their employees, I’d say it’s quite the opposite. They’re aware of what they need to do to keep relevant (or rather, regain relevancy) in the browser game, and they’re doing it.
I’m not adopting IE as my browser of choice anytime soon. But I for one am jazzed and excited to think of how soon I can ditch <embed> and <object> in future sites for a simple clean <video> without making 62% of the web’s users incapable of seeing a video.
IE 9’s improvements might be bad news for competing vendors trying to distinguish themselves from the dominant browser (although I doubt IE is catching up fast enough to cause worries for them yet), but it’s good news for designers and users everywhere.
Tags: Comic, ie9, internet explorer, tron
They’re fighting with Opera logos!
IE9 video tag should follow standard object fallback principals if this video is any indication:
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL27
You should be able to start using the video tag now.
Awesome cartoon, and nice follow-up post. Let me echo your surprise: not all of us have seen Tron? A foundation must be started, with the purpose of bringing the magic that is Tron, to those that have suffered so long without it. Oh, the humanity.
:: The concept of compete “CSS3 Support” is a myth
Me thinks you mean complete, this is great news though… but not so good that it seems it might not be installable on XP making IE 6/7/8 stick around even longer than they really should.
I do mean “complete”.
XP is, for better or worse, getting long in the tooth. But unfortunately, it’s still widely installed. I’m glad I’m not Microsoft when having to make such choices.
And to those XP users: Switch to Win7. It’s hot.
Unfortunately, currently the IE9 preview has no Canvas tag support and Microsoft has been dodging questions on whether or not they will support canvas in the IE9 timeframe.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/microsoft-embraces-html-5-specification-in-ie9-861?page=0,1
“Asked if Microsoft would support HTML5 Canvas tags in IE9, Hachamovitch said graphics supported in IE9 are GPU-powered and it remains to be seen what else might be supported in that vein.”
I still don’t think we give IE8 enough credit. Sure, it’s not exactly feature-rich, but anyone who uses it is going to get a good enough experience even for sites where we didn’t specifically design for Internet Explorer. That is to say, it fixed its box model.
If you look at the rate IE has improved, historically, it’ll be leading the industry just as much as the other browsers. It just quit, back in 2001, so it was really four or five years behind.
Oh, another note!
Apple apparently (from what I’ve heard) owns Canvas until it’s made into a W3C Recommendation, so Microsoft might not implement it until then, for patent-scare reasons.
I haven’t verified that, though. If it’s true, it would only mean anything if Apple pulled Canvas out of the HTML5 draft or the W3C rejected it.
So, soon we can post vector graphics and videos with the greatest of ease. No wait, greatest of “e”s. Ha ha.
Well, I’d like object to work and the media being video (or anything else, as I really don’t think new element types for all possible media is a good idea – , anyone?) to be indicated with MIME type. If I’m going to use video at all, then probably only as fallback from object, and then not really in the document, but rather in XBL’s shadow content, stylistic by definition. video isn’t simpler at all when object is properly supported.
Your software ate my virtual-reality-helmet tag (in angle brackets) after the hyphen.