The IE team throws bricks in a glass house

Tue, Apr 12, 2011

The IE team released a new preview of IE10 beta today along with a video demo.

The video goes out of it's way to point out some difference in CSS3 column rendering between IE 10 and Firefox 4:

Microsoft's pathetic attack on Firefox

First off, IE has had bad implementation of CSS specs since the dawn of time, so pointing out a single observed fault in Firefox is really lame.

Second, web developers are very used to testing and developing for multiple browsers and if I was doing a column layout like that one I would start by doing it in Firefox and getting it perfect and then fixing whatever is off in Internet Explorer. If I noticed a lot of differences I would assume it to be IE's problem right off the bat.

They also show off some hardware acceleration, which is fine, but it's very easy to produce examples and tests that the browser is specially optimized against.

I would love to see some JS benchmarks - then we can start having a conversation.

IE broke my heart years ago...

10 years ago I loved IE. But Microsoft dropped the ball and I'll probably never switch to IE again.

And showing me a video of a supposed speed increase of their specific tests and trying to pick on the browser that probably saved the web back in the day is incredibly *lame*.

Edit:

People seem to think this is a Firefox fan boy fest, but actually my primary browser is Google Chrome. I just believe Firefox played a significant role in the evolution of the web and web technologies while the giant, IE lay dormant. And the IE team seems to attack a single small bug in the browser - a bug that will probably be fixed automatically long before IE10 gets released.

Some developers don't seem to realize that it's actually IE's lack of updates and market share's fault that the web didn't evolve much (on a technical perspective) for a long time from around 2004-2008.