HTML5 and Internet Explorer

Just fair warning, this is a rant. If you are Microsoft, read it! If you’re easily offended by slagging out corporates that just don’t get it. Please do not continue.

There is a lot to be said about ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or keeping up in general.

Microsoft has again failed in keeping up with the standards that the web revolves around. They say that they have full support for HTML5 and CSS3 – which would be awesome, if it were true.

Looks like they have again failed to make our job easier, so instead of being able to make some really cool and awesome looking and functional sites, we are stuck doing what we think is awesome, and then tailoring it back few notches to accomodate for 70 – 90% of our customers’ web browser. Makes me so cranky that we just can’t do what we want to do (and what is W3C compliant) and show you all our awesomeness.

I wonder what it would take to convince Microsoft to give up on their own sub standard browser and help fund Chrome, Firefox or Safari? They’re all great! (and compliant) They all are 90% up to date with the standards. To put it in perspective, Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is about as advanced as Firefox 3.5 which was released 2 years ago! So, the technologies that have been in use for two years… TWO INTERNET YEARS!.. Microsoft has JUST figured it out.

What was happening 2 years ago?

  • A little known artist calling herself ‘Lady Gaga’ released ‘Poker Face’.
  • The iPhone 1 was still popular… it didn’t have MMS.
  • MySpace was on par with Facebook. It looked like MySpace would win.
  • Twitter? What’s that? It’ll never take off.
  • Microsoft was pushing Vista.
  • More people used IE6 than any other browser in the market… (AAHH!!) that was a browser released 9 years earlier! Two other FREE, AUTOMATICALLY UPDATED Microsoft based browsers were released at that time.

I know I say this, but still… a number of our clients are still using IE6 – GAH! – You know who you are and you know what to do!