Microsoft's IE9 breaks into HTML5 & CSS3

I think it's fair to say that IE9 looks to be about the most exciting and positive thing Microsoft have done with a browser for a long, long time.  

Microsoft's browser market share is in what looks like terminal decline so releasing a browser that gets the support of the web development community should surely boost, or at least stabilise, their share.  And what is it that makes the web development community deride IE? ... well partly its the legacy of IE6 - a browser that still makes up nearly 10% of the market - and partly it's IE7 and 8's total lack of support for any of the new technologies that are driving web innovation... 

Is that all about to change?!

Looks like it.  Certainly moving in the right direction anyway.  Today we're very proud to be adding IE9 to our list of browsers on our Web Designer's Browser Support Checklist.  

What's remarkable is that those big columns of crosses we've all been sniggering about for months are finally starting to disperse.. there are a few chinks of green-tick emerging from the IE columns after all.

What does IE9 support? Are these real results?

Well, largely, the new IE9 results are real results.  They were recorded with the help of one of the IE9 developers who was kind enough to guide me through a couple of details as to what IE9 will and won't support - because my IE9 preview is having some script gremlins...   Most of the results were recorded with the IE9 Preview #2.  We've had to patch the target-selector result ( because of a bug with the way fmbip redirects to the hash-tag ) and a couple of the codecs but that's all.

The good news

The good news therefore is IE9 will bring full support for CSS3 selectors and HTML5 embedded content to the third of the world who use IE.  There'll also be limited support for CSS3 properties and HTML5 web applications, the latter available since IE8.

The bad news

From what I understand IE9 will still miss a lot of the newer, designer's CSS3 properties that Safari and Chrome (and FF to an extent ) provide; Border Image, Gradients, Reflections, Animations & Transitions etc.

There's also no sign of any of the new form elements or attributes either... but then, as you can see from our scores these are still so poorly supported by other browsers that they're not really usable yet.

A thank you

A big thank you to Eric in the IE9 team for his help and support getting this column together.  I was struggling to get my IE9 preview to behave so I'm very grateful for all his help.  Here's to a great new browser to up the game a little for all the manufacturers involved!