Mozilla Sets the Record Straight on IE9

Posted 02/17/2011 at 1:44am | by Pulkit Chandna

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The recent release of the IE9 Release Candidate gave Microsoft an opportunity to rave about all the wonderful things it has achieved. Heavily touted in particular was the browser’s unprecedented compliance with modern web standards like HTML5 and CSS3.  But Mozilla’s tech evangelist Paul Rouget has taken umbrage at Redmond’s assertion of superior standards compliance.

While Rouget concedes that IE9 is certainly a more modern browser compared to its predecessor, it still fails the test of contemporaneity according to him. So what about the thousands of test cases that, according to Microsoft, help establish the browser’s superiority over its rivals?

Rouget isn’t too surprised that “they pass the very tests they used to design and develop the browser - we score pretty well against our own unit-tests as well.” He said that the tests were never meant to give well balanced results, pointing instead to IE9’s miserable performance in real-world tests like cainuse.com and html5test.com.

“The reality is that IE9 is 2 years late. Microsoft is glad to come out with the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, SVG, and some CSS3. Like other vendors did years ago. Firefox 3.5 had the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, Geolocation, SVG in 2009. Canvas and SVG existed 5 years ago,” Rouget wrote in an article.