Congratulations Microsoft
By glazou on Friday 14 May 2010, 11:15 - CSS and style - Permalink
Yes, sincere congrats. Well done. The second beta preview of IE9 implements all of CSS 3 Selectors. It even implements (without a -ms-* prefix 
Microsoft has really a problem with vendor prefixes...) the ::selection pseudo-element. It passes all my own Selectors test. It's even said to pass 100% of the Selectors Test Suite (an Implementation Report would be useful here, please) ! Wooohooo !!! For the record, former versions of IE were so bad at that Test Suite that adding them to the Implementation Report was pointless.
This is not only good news for IE9, it's good news for the whole Web. Microsoft is putting so much energy and "new" features inside IE9 that it's going to be a major incentive to drop former versions of IE and move to v9.
One (big) nit though: IE9 is only available for Vista and 7... While zillions of users, and in particular corporations, still use XP and don't plan to drop it any time soon. The unavailability of IE9 on XP will be a (big) slowdown factor to the obsolescence of IE6, 7 and 8. And I don't like that. I don't care about the tech reasons for that (graphics hardware acceleration bla bla), I don't like that at all. Un rendez-vous manqué.
Comments
IE9 won't have as much adoption as IE8 because it won't have an operating system that comes with it. Not being available for Windows XP or Linux or Mac is a big hit too.
IE9 will probably be good, but it will only live because of the name. I have no doubt it will be beaten at everything by the competition. Maybe not when it comes out, but like two or three months after. Microsoft have the resources, but they don't have the updates... For whatever reason.
It's still great news though.
Well, microsoft originally planned to drop XP support with IE7, so I guess we have to be grateful for small mercies.
I wouldn't be too gloomy about IE9 adoption. The main reason IE6 has hung around for so long is because lots of corporate web apps didn't work with IE7. We've got a much more standards-based industry today, so most IE8 apps will likely work fine in IE9, meaning corporate IT departments will be a lot keener to upgrade.
Ian
Considering the rapid Windows 7 and across-the-board IE8 adoption I've seen in the US (based on the stats for the sites I work on), I'm not all that worried about IE9 adoption, whether it's available on WinXP or not. (I am, however, still dealing with Mac users who won't upgrade from 10.2 or 10.3, and thus can't upgrade Safari, so everyone's got their issues...)
Thanks for the compliments on IE9 - we're thrilled you like the work we've done on CSS 3 selectors.
To respond to your final comment, as others have noted, Windows XP is nine years old now. It came out just a couple of months after Mac OS 9.2, and two years before even the first version of Safari! It had a great run, but we want to take advantage of the last ten years' advances in Windows to build a modern browser that will last for years to come. We share your interest in moving the world forward from IE6 - see for example http://bit.ly/bDBh3z
Best wishes, Tim
Well, Mr. Sneath, I find it very hard to swallow that Microsoft wants to move on (and I agree with them!) and focus on new and improved Windows versions and stop supporting the old ones, but doesn't want to move on and stop supporting the old version of IE, which is way more dangerous than XP in relative terms.
Someone, somewhere else, complained that the web was rubbish in comparison to offline applications. I said "the web is rubbish because so many people still use Internet Explorer 6 and 7". And I'm positive you'll agree with me. So please, stop making the web rubbish, and stop caring about users that don't care about themselves. Stop worrying so much about loosing market share, because what you're doing to prevent it (still supporting IE6) is loosing you even more market share!
But I'm dumb, and I don't have money to create my own Microsoft, so do as you please.
@Tiago Sá:
> But I'm dumb...
Nothing more to say.