![]() If so, I hope it lets IE9 users in I’m curious to see how well the new IE would handle Apple’s demos.)īeyond HTML5, Microsoft’s other big bet with IE9 is hardware acceleration: rendering technologies which take full advantage of a PC’s graphical horsepower. Maybe Apple has been blocking all versions of Internet Explorer on the assumption–valid until yesterday–that Microsoft browsers don’t do next-generation Web stuff at all. But when I try it out in IE9, it’s not that I get a bad experience–I get no experience at all: (Side note: Apple’s HTML5 showcase looks smashing in Safari and is viewable in Chrome and Firefox, too. At the moment, no thorough exhibition of HTML5 technologies is going to work the same on every browser. But HTML5 is still a work in progress–various aspects of it are supported to greater or lesser degrees by different browsers, or in inconsistent fashion. All the other browser companies are aboard, too. It’s not devising proprietary technologies which box Web sites and Web users into dependence on IE it’s just jumping on the open HTML5 standards bandwagon with all the energy it can muster. I don’t mean to suggest that Microsoft is up to anything nefarious here. It’s essentially an “ Only Viewable in Internet Explorer” site. (Just for yucks, I tried it on an iPad, too it didn’t display as intended there.) But the aforementioned BMW site is unbearably slow on Safari and Chrome, and I can’t get it to run at all on a Firefox. An elegant site called Lost World Fairs, designed in part to play with a typographical technology called Web Open File Format (WOFF), is equally neat in IE9, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. On other browsers, however, you take your chances. The warning above (which is on BMW’s Joy Defines the Future) is typical, and it’s accurate. The partners demonstrated their work at Microsoft’s IE9 launch event in San Francisco yesterday, and the Beauty of the Web site lets anyone check them out. As part of its Internet Explorer 9 beta launch, Microsoft partnered with several dozen other companies–from LinkedIn to BMW CNN to a bunch of small-but-inventive outfits I’d never heard of–to create Web experiences that show off IE9’s new capabilities. The sites in question are all linked to from a Microsoft site called Beauty of the Web. Today, however, I’ve been getting a queasy feeling of deja vu as I explore a bunch of Web sites that display messages such as this: That’s in part because contemporary browsers have supported major Web standards in at least acceptable fashion, and in part because site proprietors realized that it was a lousy idea to build sites that welcomed in users of some browsers while shutting others out. On the modern, mainstream Web, the concept of “Best Viewed With” has become nearly extinct. (I have the horrible feeling that such sites are still out there, although the last one I encountered myself belonged to a financial institution which I stopped doing business with in 2009.) It was like turning onto a highway and discovering signs saying it was best driven in a Buick or a Kia.Įventually there were sites that would only operate properly in IE, most often because they used Microsoft’s IE-only ActiveX. ![]() Remember the bad old days of the Internet, when it wasn’t a given that one primary objective of any Web site should be to work equally well in any modern browser? Some sites slapped “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer” or “Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator” logos (or both of them) onto their home pages, like perverse badges of honor.
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