Journal

Live blogging Standards.Next: Future of Internet Explorer

November 20, 2009 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment

Pete LePage
Senior Product Manager, Developers & Security for IE

IE 8

IE 8 is a hybrid, has two engines; IE 9 will have three engines: IE 7, IE 8 and IE 9. This way can ensure site works in future versions of the browser.

IE 8 supports session and local storage (see presentation by Marcus Lofthouse to the New York Web Standards Meetup). Added addition to spec: a way to remove all.

Mutable DOM prototypes: take a DOM element and add properties/methods to it. Add method to img. There are a number of things not implemented in IE 8. Can write a chunk of JavaScript that adds functionality to browser. This will be used by people writing the JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Dojo).

Native JSON support.

Network events

CrossDocumentMessaging and CrossDomainRequest

Selectors API

Fixed getElementById.

Demos at ie8demos.com (browser-sniffs and only wants to work in IE 8).

IE 9

• Faster; speed is important. Finally comparable to FF.
• A lot of work on standards-support. Will implement border-radius. Acid3 score went from 20 to 32. IE 8 Current CSS3 support is vertical-text. Hope to more than double it in IE 9.

Questions/Answers

Q: Why always trying to play catch up? Why not just adopt Webkit?

A: A lot of things that make adopting Webkit or Gecko more difficult than it seems.

Q: Any release date for IE 9?

A: No dates as of now

Q: Still trying to get Canvas out of the spec for HTML5?

A: Not sure; might be a miscommunication

Q: Any major updates planned for IE 8?

A: Probably not; next major version will be 9. Security updates will be released for 8, but the rendering engine will not change.

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