Seriously Zeldman, how can you get IE 9 so badly?

While reading Zeldman’s article on IE9 I came to agree with what Paul Thurrott had to say about it. Frankly, I can’t grasp how a person so “in the know” doesn’t get Microsoft as of late. It seems the only thing people can see is Microsoft hate. There’s even people who won’t trust Paul Thurrott on the basis that his work is based on Microsoft products; that is, he’d need Microsoft to succeed to do business and would thus create biased articles.

Non-sense! How can anyone say this while Zeldman is himself actually so wrong. Let’s dig in!

Thus efforts to catch up to the typographic legibility and beauty of Mac OS X and Webkit browsers are presented, in Dean Hachamovitch’s blog post, as leading-edge innovations.

Well, first and foremost, this “typographic legibility” has nothing to do with the WebKit engine. In fact, it has nothing to do with any browser engine what-so-ever. It doesn’t even have to do with IE 9 itself. The reality is this is an OS-level feature. Mac OS X creates these smooth fonts on the OS-level, and the Direct2D APIs are OS-level APIs too so this is as much for IE 9. Proof of fact, Windows XP does not support IE 9 because it doesn’t have the Direct2D APIs. Linux operating systems also have their own smoothing systems which are different and it doesn’t have anything to do with browsers. In fact, the new versions of Safari for Windows employ native font smoothing, and every browser, be it Presto or Gecko or WebKit, has the same beautiful fonts on Mac OS X. *

* I know it is possible to have a separate smooth-font rendering engine (e.g. PDF readers) but in the case of WebKit, it’s pretty much a proprietary Apple thing and has nothing to do with WebKit itself

Point made, the whole Direct2D thing isn’t really about fonts, it’s about having the complex graphics on IE 9 rendered with the Video Card. You might be wondering why the hell you’d want to do that for web sites, but it actually makes a lot of sense. What this enables is something beyond JavaScript. It’s purely on the rendering technical standpoint and let me tell you it works.

Scrolling web pages for example, or simply displaying complex web pages, is much faster in IE 9 because it’s GPU-accelerated. It’s amazing how smooth it is for even web sites that usually lag in yes, Google Chrome, apparently the fastest browser on Earth. There’s much more to “fast” than simply JavaScript.

Getting IE fully up to speed on web standards is much more important than introducing any proprietary innovations. (Naturally I agree with this, as it is, in a nutshell, what The Web Standards Project told browser companies back in 1998—and it is still true.)

What’s funny with this is most people, including Zeldman, fail to realize that HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t even web standards yet and that most browsers actually implement however they want with total disregard of the W3C. Sure, it’s always been like that, but Microsoft is actually going for real support of web standards the right way, and it delivers. They didn’t just put proprietary technologies in IE 9, they put tons of web standards stuff for HTML5, CSS3 and SVG that no other browser today can match.

Yes, believe it or not, just check this out http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/ if you don’t, IE 9 has the most complete support for HTML5, CSS3 and SVG features to date.

Oh, oh, wait, it doesn’t pass the Acid Test 3. So sad, did you know the Acid Test 3 implements HTML5 features the wrong way, either based on bugs which are assumed to be the way web developers make web sites or based on now obsolete ways to render HTML5 and CSS3. The Acid 2 test was based on well-established standards, like CSS 2.1. But the Acid 3 test is based on a draft that isn’t even final and has been replaced by a newer version now.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s refusal to switch to Webkit gives Apple and Google a competitive advantage, and that is good because a web in which one browser has a monopoly stifles standards and innovation alike. By torturing the IE rendering engine every couple of years instead of putting it out of its misery, Microsoft contributes to the withering away of its own monopoly.

Wait, refusal to switch to WebKit? Did someone declare WebKit as the godliest engine on Earth or did I miss something? WebKit is not a reference because Apple and Google use it. Opera’s Presto is often even more competitive, and Mozilla’s JavaScript implementation is more recent. Not only that, I really don’t get how this gives any competitive advantage to Apple or Google. What if Microsoft succeeds at making the IE 9 engine better? Who’s gonna be laughing now? They did just proved it was better at standards than WebKit and Opera did prove their engine was faster. Besides, it doesn’t really have to do with WebKit since Google Chrome’s latest releases are faster than both Safari and Opera, and Safari uses WebKit.

Quite simply, I just don’t understand Zeldman. His points don’t make sense.

I still don’t like proprietary software, but I’m still proud of Microsoft for moving forward and trying to make my life as a web developer easier. I’m not sure blocking Windows XP is such a good idea though. But hopefully it’ll force the governments to move to Windows 7 (heck, not only I’m stuck on XP at my job, they blocked the IE 8 installation, can you believe that? Yes, I’m stuck with IE 7, but I do have Firefox and Opera at least).