Apparently Microsoft is trying to step up their game with Internet Explorer 9, allowing them to continue dominating the web browser wars. FireFox has grown popular among web developers and programmers because of its attention to web standards, which results in better coding practices. Internet Explorer 8, released at the beginning of this year, differentiated itself from its earlier predecessors by attempting to better adhere to W3C web standards to allow for better support for HTML and CSS, something FireFox has always done well. A common problem when checking for website interoperability between Internet Explorer 6&7 and FireFox was that Cascading Style Sheets and the HTML code tended to return different visual results in the browser despite the HTML and CSS code being read the same.
As a developer, it's great to hear that Microsoft has taken the initiative to improve its browser experience by sending Internet Explorer team members to a World Wide Web Consortium meeting to ensure that they build Internet Explorer 9 to be the best browser it can be for web developers and Internet users alike. I'm excited to hear that Internet Explorer 9 will offer hardware accelerated text and graphics, which will bring development for the web to a whole new level. Web developers will be able to create applications and websites that plug in to a user's PC's graphics hardware or graphics card to deliver a more visually appealing experience through the web browser by allowing text and graphics to be more crisp and clear. The improved support for JavaScript/jQuery and CSS in Internet Explorer 9 will also be most welcomed by developers.
I feel that as Microsoft continues to improve upon its Internet Explorer browsers with each new version, the development gap know as "designing for interoperability across all web browser platforms" can move in two different ways. The gap will either slowly start to close as developers will not have to write custom code for each different browser, because the CSS and HTML code will display as intended the first time around due to better web standards in the browser. On the other end, the gap could widen if Internet Explorer 9 continues to follow the pattern of past versions of IE, meaning developers will have one more browser to check their sites in, increasing their workload and resulting in more conditional statements and extra, unneeded CSS style sheets. Of course, people will actually have to update their browsers to take advantage of these new technologies, but unfortunately many people continue to use Internet Explorer 6, so developers will continue to struggle to meet the needs of all web browsers and their users.
