Is this Cross-browser Test mean that IE 9.0 is the best?

Question

Is the results in this http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter mean that IE 9.0 will be the best of all browsers next years ?

Answer 1

No it means that the link is from *microsoft.com/* :-D

(Seriously, they start to change but IE is far behind any browser out there. It misses FF extensions, Opera's functionality, Chrome's speed. And Opera/Chrome will catch up soon I guess. And also, HTML5 is not a valid specification, its more like a draft. Apple used this out and made a totally restricted stuff, a demo with that, promoting, 'hey its html5'.)

More info about the (apple/)html5 "specification":

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/06/intellectual-honesty-and-html5/
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/06/04/apple-html5

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So in a nutshell: They demonstrated a html5. A html5. There is no strict html5 specification. The only common things are <audio> and <video>. Read the links. :)

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About other features: IE will bring no new thing. GPU accel is one of the most hyped features but Firefox nightly also comes with gpu accel, and you can enable it in chrome 6.xx. So basically, just nothing new, way behind the others.

Answer 2

Who knows? Those are hardly unbiased tests, and even with fancy new features, IE will probably still not follow web standards.

In any case, we've gone beyond "One best browser" these days. Most browsers are "fast enough" compared to the competition, and IE has such a bad (Yet well deserved) reputation among most web developers, that IE-only features are unlikely to be adopted in any kind of widespread manner. IE9 could surprise us all and be fantastic, but we'll have to wait until we can actually get our hands on it to find that out.

Answer 3

Any test run by the manufacturer should be treated as biased.

I'd try and find a test that wasn't hosted by Microsoft, Google or Apple (for example) and was from someone or an organisation you could trust to be independent.

These results are probably a good starting point and will be accurate, but won't necessarily test a realistic browsing session.

Answer 4

There's more to a web browser than standards conformance. Think back to IE6, which was alright in its day, but lacked tabs.

That said, IE is getting better lately. Hating IE is starting to become the "cool thing to do" that everyone does baselessly out of habit. I'll admit I haven't given IE8 a fair shot yet.

Answer 5

Another reason might be due to the large number of people still using IE, more developers would still develop web base on IE rendering. And add on other css for other browsers if they have time.