I have a suspicion that they will focus heavily on ie because of windows phone 7 - they desperately need developers, and will do whatever they can to get them on their new mobile platform, be it native or web-apps. (this all relies on the desktop and mobile versions of ie sharing a codebase.
I should have looked at your comment before posting my own similar comment, but I wanted to add that the codebase sharing is almost a given. With Windows 8 being ported to ARM one can only assume it's to bring a very full implementation of Windows to the mobile market.
full implementation? If I were to create Windows for ARM, I would take the opportunity to get rid of as much ballast as possible. Examples:
- ditch all non-Unicode APIs
- ditch a zillion older/ancient graphics technologies
- ditch a zillion older/ancient database access layers
- get rid of that ROM-based font and character mode displays
- ditch various shims for older software (yes, it would be cool to download Visicalc from http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm and run it, but it is not that necessary, and my feature list would not contain a X86 emulator, anyways)
Microsoft is becoming less and less of a gatekeeper with the rise of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
In 2-3 years when the next "version" of HTML gains the public eye, they will not have a stranglehold on the web. I'd be more worried about Apple or Google than MS (as silly as it may sound now).
I am less worried about Google because webkit, chromium, v8, etc. are open source. I think Apple has a pretty good record with open standards, but they have a big incentive to keep people buying native apps on iOS (and i guess on OSX too now). It is definitely not in their intrest to have people easily build cross platform mobile apps when the default is for people to build iOS native apps first now.
Microsoft is going to keep caring because the browser has become the most important application on a computer.
If Internet Explorer is garbage then sure the average user could go download a third party browser but they could also just jump ship to a non-Microsoft operating system or device.
The trend over the last couple of years is users just wanting something that works out of the box and if Microsoft wants to keep those users on Windows or other MS devices then IE is going to have to stay competitive.
Is this what-if really worth thinking about? If and when that time comes whoever is using IE can just switch to one of the half-dozen other browsers on their platform.
When IE6 stagnated, it had a market share of over 95%. So if a web developer wanted to take advantage of new HTML/CSS features, only 5% of their users would notice, and so it wasn't really worth the cost. This meant that all websites had to work in IE6, so there was less incentive to switch browsers.
Now IE market share is closer to 40%, so whilst they're still the market leader, they no longer have a majority. Even if Microsoft ceased development on IE9 now, web developers could still use new HTML/CSS features and reach 60% of their audience. This would mean more websites using new features, which would result in a faster switch from IE.
If you have a monopoly, you can afford to sit back and allow technology to stagnate. If you don't, and your competitors are constantly developing new features, you'll lose market share rapidly unless you keep up.
your competitors are constantly developing new features, you'll lose market share rapidly unless you keep up
This, in a nutshell, is why IE9 is not oing to be "as good as it gets". To be sympathetic to IE9, it's a good start. But only a good start. The people inside MS who plan IE must know that there's more work to do in order to keep up with the competition, let alone speed up and overtake them. MS is used to running marathons when they have to, not betting it all on one version.
That isn't the point. The point is that it will take a very, very long time until the (outdated) IE community is small enough for developers to ignore.
And now things have changed - it will take a very, very long time, or more likely never happen, for the Firefox, Opera, Chrome, iPad and android community to be small enough again for MS to ignore. So IE has to progress.
It's not as good as it gets for one simple reason. Mobile. Ms's policy when behind is embrace and extend. They are almost behind in browser share and are currently not in the running with win phone 7 (that could change rapidly as their offering is on a technical level in the running). In order to compete on mobile they will have to bring their browser upto webkit levels. They will do this as if they lose mobile they become irrelevant in the next 10 years. Mobile is the new desktop and desktop client + office is their bread and butter
I have very little hope that IE 9 will change anything about the IE problem. What we need is continuous releases of IE like we see it with other browsers. I don't see anything in Ms's behavior that indicates that that's what will be happening once IE 9 is released. It will probably take years until we see IE 10 and updates to IE 9 will only be minor bug fixes.
Some of the posts here show that people think that Microsoft loses it's dominance if they don't deliver a better browser. It's in Microsoft's best interest to have the average user use the worst browser possible. Yes, it's true Microsoft has missed out on the Internet. But by providing users with a great browser doesn't make this problem smaller, it make sit bigger. For example Google Docs and GMail become more of an alternative to Outlook and Office, if you have a good browser. That's not in Microsoft's interest. So the bets strategy for Microsoft is to release a browser that's only as good as necessary to keep the majority of users from moving away from it, but at the same time makes web development as hard as possible. As someone else here pointed out. MS implemented all the big prominent buzz wordy stuff like Canvas, rounded corners, etc. All the features even non-developers might have heard about and will make them think they are using a great modern browser that has all the awesome flashy stuff they read about. However, many things that actually would help taking web development to a next level like web sockets, workers and esp. the app cache aren't there. I am pretty sure MS could have implemented that stuff if hey had really wanted to, but that would have supported the Internet, in which MS is very little invested, too much and weakened their Desktop apps even more. So nothing will be happening until everyone's unhappiness with MS's IE effort has reached a critical point again and even then we will only get a minimum of what MS thinks they have to give us to please the crowd.
Biten once twice shy. They have been burnt badly by ignoring internet for a long time even though they were made aware of its importance by numerous memos. GOOG and AAPL won't let them rest on the laurels of IE9.
This is revisionist history, admittedly very well propagated.
The Vista debacle caused MS to get flat footed on IE. They never ignored IE, but their ship vehicle was reset and delayed. Which forced them to do an intermediate release.
Funny, his list of things that IE9 supports reads like a list of cool HTML5 stuff you'd want to use. The "things it doesn't support" list looks like something he made up on the spot (though clearly they're all real things that somebody has proposed putting into web browsers.)
But it's all stuff that doesn't belong in web browsers. (OK, maybe WebSockets). If it were up to me, now would be the time to actually standardize some of those things on the first list so that they work cross browser. Then we're done.
* The improvement to forms and forms management are long overdue and extremely interesting, especially for mobile phones.
* The History API is extremely needed right now, as it allows sites to have their cake and eat it too in regards to JS-drive Single Page Interfaces still mapping to actual resources (bookmarkable, and sharable, and not blowing up if there is a JS issue or JS is disabled).
* The File API is an other domain which is full of pain right now for web applications: the only way to correctly manage files without ending up wanting to shoot yourself is to use Flash, that's how bad it is.
* Audio Data, WebGL, WebWorkers, WebSockets and AppCache are necessary gateways to move more "desktop-class" applications to the web (fully online, or offlined from the web).
The stuff IE9 is missing is actually more helpful and interesting for the vast majority of content-oriented websites (not to mention web applications, WebGL has infinitely more potential than Canvas, let alone SVG) that the stuff it does have.
History API is huge: ability to use real permalinks and back/forward in a dynamic web app without full page reloads. (We all want to get rid of the those damn #!hashbangs.)
WebGL opens up far more possibilities for cross-platform gaming than <canvas> and SVG combined.
Some of the others, admittedly, are only useful in edge cases, or are just plain pipe dreams (<device> in particular). But many are already supported by non-IE browsers, and all the other players have clearly broadcasted their intent to keep improving and evolving. Microsoft (AFAIK) has yet to do any such thing.
(Grandparent: Just because something isn’t in (all) browsers now doesn’t mean it “doesn’t belong” or, less straw-man-ish, that it wouldn’t be useful for some browsers to support; not all browsers need to implement everything, that’s why we have feature detection. But having IE, still the #1 most popular browser, on board really opens doors.)
I wasn't aware that progress was being made; nothing would please me more than device APIs in JavaScript. I don't know of any working implementations in the field, though.
