April, 2010

There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view. The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C . HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support...

Several people on the Windows Internet Explorer team have written blog posts about our feedback mechanisms ( our use of automated telemetry in Windows , how to write a great bug , how to submit bugs , etc) for IE9. After looking at the many similarities and obvious differences between manual feedback systems and projects, we decided to use Microsoft Connect for IE9 and eliminate the invitation requirement for filing bugs. In this post, I want to take a step back and talk about how we made that decision...

Since the release of the IE9 Preview, we’ve gotten feedback on issues ranging from the tests we’ve submitted to the standards body to problems running particular sites. First – THANK YOU for the feedback. We updated the feedback system specifically for this purpose: to get and act on your feedback. This post offers a high level overview of the feedback overall, and a deeper look at a couple of specific issues that many people have reported. As of April 16 th , people have logged 533 issues in...

On April 8, 2010, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft submitted the WOFF File Format 1.0 specification to the W3C. The submission was published on Monday, April 19 at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/03/ . Browser vendors and a growing number of type foundries now agree on a common encoding format for web fonts, thus closing an era of cross-browser incompatibility that began when IE4 and Netscape 4 first added support for downloadable fonts in 1997. At the time, both Microsoft and Netscape implemented...

At MIX 10 we released the IE9 Platform Preview and showed some of the included developer tools. You can access these tools by pressing F12, or click Developer Tools on the Debug menu when you use the Platform Preview. The developer tools include some new capabilities and improvements over the tools in IE8: A new tab for inspecting network traffic. Improved performance working with large JavaScript files: think 70k+ lines of code (even if it’s all on one line!) Improved CSS view...

The IE team is active on several W3C working groups such as SVG and HTML . As one of our three regular CSS Working Group (CSSWG) representatives, I wanted to follow up on the latest face-to-face meeting the group held at Apple in Cupertino at the end of last month by sharing some of the work and progress being made. While it aims to be representative of the three-day meeting, the list below is not exhaustive. CSS2.1 and the CSS test suite: the working group discussed many of the remaining open...

I recently presented a session at MIX10 covering the topic of cross-browser best practices. The key focus of the session was not on a particular feature, but on how web developers can reliably write code that adapts to cross-browser differences. IE9 reduces these differences and enables developers to use the same markup across browsers. Enabling the same markup means supporting the right features to make the same HTML, JavaScript, and CSS "just work". Yet enabling the same markup on the web is...

I want to follow-up on comments from a previous post that asked questions about how many modes and rendering engines are in IE9. It’s worth noting that all browsers have multiple modes . This post is about the different modes in IE9 and the scenarios they accommodate. First, there is IE9’s Standards mode. It is IE9’s most standards-compliant, interoperable and fastest mode. It includes support for SVG , CSS3 , DOM Level 3 , and many other standards-based features . This is IE9’s default mode....

At MIX 10 we showed how we’re building on new Windows technologies like Direct2D, DirectWrite and XPS to enable Internet Explorer 9 to render all standards-based web content – text, images, video and SVG – using the power of the GPU. In this blog post we’ll review the major improvements for web developers and users that come from building on these Windows technologies. For more detailed information on Direct2D technologies, see this excellent PDC2008 talk . Performance, performance, performance...

One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We’re excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance...