Microsoft decries standards grandstanding

[Josh]

Los Angeles – Microsoft will be compliant with industry standards in Internet Explorer 9 such as HTML 5, but Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, decried the habit of vendors getting ahead of the process.

Browser that launched an industry turns 15

"We are not trying to market things that are not there for developers to use yet," said Sinofsky during an interview with Network World. "Whether they are in IE or not, saying you are standards based but then saying you are the most HTML 5 compliant browser does not make sense because the standard is not [complete] yet. There is a little bit of a time warp going on."

Sinofsky was making reference to Mozilla who is pushing heavily on HTML 5 in development of its Firefox browser. The browser issue is a hot topic given that Microsoft has lost over the past year about 7% market share, according the thecounter.com, as users gave up on IE 7 to go to alternatives such as Firefox and Safari. Microsoft is hoping IE 8 can attack that trend and have IE 9 squash it.

Sinofsky characterized his stand as responsible engineering. "We understand people's desire for interoperability so HTML 5 is a thing that people talk about a lot but it is not even at the standard recommendation phase yet." Microsoft supports some aspects of the standard that are complete now such as storage and cross-site navigation.

Microsoft, however, is working toward full support on the HTML 5 specification, which was one of three advancements Sinofsky highlighted when he talked about IE 9 during his Wednesday keynote address.

The other two were improvements on the Acid 3 test of standards compatibility, where Microsoft now scores 32 out of 100 with its latest prototype browser, and GPU-based rendering, which takes advantage of hardware for tasks such as animation or rendering type.

"These three things will be in IE 9," he said. But he would not provide any delivery dates for the software.

In terms of Acid 3, a test from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a browser follows certain parts of Web standards, Sinofsky admitted there is work to do and said that Microsoft is doing it.

Source

[zridling]

Open standards make the world go 'round, at least make the web possible. Sinofsky was pissed about something in that interview, but I agree that there's no need to talk about the next version when you're elbow deep in building it. IE8 was a great improvement, and let's hope 9 will make it two in a row.

[Innuendo]

Browser that launched an industry? Wouldn't that be Mosaic?

[wraith808]

If you look at it in terms of industry... that would be a no, IMO.  Mosaic launched the mainstream access to the web... but it wasn't really industrialized until later (ok... you could say arguably that Netscape did... and it's based on Mosaic.  But that wasn't really a systematic industrialization of the web, IMO)

[zridling]

Here it is almost 2010 and Microsoft is fighting open standards (again). This time with Silverlight:
http://www.osnews.co...rlight_vs_Standards/

Between Apple and Microsoft, it's a "choose your captor" strategy, it seems.