Microsoft’s IE development team have announced their first developer preview for the latest version of Internet Explorer.
IE9 is rumoured to include several <html5> and CSS3 elements, making it a real contender in the new range of “modern browsers”.
You can read more about the release on the IE Blog, or jump straight over to the resources and “test drive” the new release.
I will update this post with my thoughts on the preview, once I’ve had a play with it.
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Development team has made a post on their blog about the next instalment of the Internet Explorer Saga (rumoured to be the last Redmond based browser to bear the name Internet Explorer). Unfortunately there is no alpha build available with this post for us to play with, just the usual spiel telling us about how good IE9 is will be might be, and how it compares to the “latest” (as of 18/11/09) builds of other more popular browsers.
Full of “how are javascript engine is better than your javascript engine” talk, there isn’t much about the features it will include, or a reason why they dont just release a version 8.* will all these updates rather than just going for version 9, but it does highlight their focus on improving CSS support (including rounded corners), its defiantly worth a quick read and also a bookmark for those of you not already subscribed to the RSS feed.
You can find the post on the IE Developer Blog
Microsoft announced via its Internet Explorer blog yesterday that it will continue to support IE6 for those that don’t wish to upgrade it, until the end of the relevant windows product lifecycle. According to the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search, extended support for Windows XP (the only officially supported home of IE6) is not due to end untill April 2014 meaning unless something drastic happens IE6 still has a good few years left to go and will reach its 13 birthday before it is officially retired.
The Microsoft blog post was made in responce to a Digg blog post made a few weeks ago asking visitors to the site using IE6 to comment and vote on why they still use the ageing browser. The results showed that while numbers are decreasing, there are still a lot of people using the browser, a statistic backed up by numerous other sources.
It did however once again highlight that the majority of these users were at work and unable to upgrade it due to internal IT policies and potential cost of upgrading, so the question of “should you support IE6 when building a website” comes down to one thing… Your target audiance.
If your site isn’t aimed at people in the workplace, a social networking site, an online shop or gaming website for example, then you can probably get away with your site not looking or working as flash and fancy as it does in a modern browser, although you should check users can navigate around or display a message advising they re-visit in an alternate browser. If your target audience is the home user… add as much javascript and inline-blocks as you can handle.
I think the news Microsoft will continue to support an out of date version instead of “persuading” office users to upgrade to their flagship browser isn’t in the best interests of itself or its customers, numerous security issues, non-standards compliant..need i go on.
I think the line they have taken that as it comes with a default installation of windows they must support it till the end of that products lifecycle is a blow to developers everywhere and will ensure the pothole on the internet roadmap will be with us for another few years yet.
Unless you use Opera, Safari (windows version), Chrome and several others… not to mention IE6 used by more ‘Office’ workers than anyone.
The Microsoft Office team working on the new web version have announced in a very ironic blog post that the new service will only be supported via the following browsers
They haven’t ruled out support for other browsers in the future and just say to “Give it a try … and let us know if you see issues”.
They do make a good point tho andstatistics wise they have chosen the most popular browsers used (although I would swap Safari for Opera in my list) and focused on them for launch support and the fact they have left off IE6 could be a blessing for all of us.
Microsoft Office is used by almost all businesses around the world at some point or another, most of which are also still using IE6 as their main browser for one reason or another (that’s a different argument for another day). By not supporting IE6 and pushing businesses to use the web version of office instead, they are in a great position to quietly force businesses to upgrade and join the rest of us in standards compliant (almost in IE’s case) browser world. whether or not the big cheeses will go for rolling out a browser upgrade or just stick to using existing versions of office will be interesting to see but I for one hope they do…
You can read more on this story by reading the microsoft office blog post by clicking the link above.
Just a few days after showing us what Firefox 3.7 may have in store visual-wise, Mozilla have released some windows theme mock-ups of what version 4 of the open-source browser might look like.
Personally I would go for version B, mainly as it ties the location bar into a tab rather than just sitting on top like it currently does. (anyone else see some sort of Chrome insparation going on?)
Which version do you prefer? add your comments below…