Supporting HTML5

It appears that supporting HTML5 has added one more battlefield in the browser war. To get a score on how well your browser supports HTML5, click here or simply type http://html5test.com/ in your browser. As of today, on my DellE6400 (yes, it's an old Dog), Mozilla 3.5.7 scored 126/300 and IE7 scored a measly 12/300. May be that is why, MicroSoft is aggressively moving forward with IE9, which should support HTML5. Looking at a youtube video (2.56 minutes), I could see the difference in performance. The demos were definitly faster on IE9 compared to firefox and google chrome. But then the video is provided by msdn! What do you think they are going to highlight? As per MicroSoft, they are doing this by harnessing the power of hardware while others are still using the software rendering. You can read more here. I believe they probably have better performance on MS-Windows environment. How IE9 performs on other operating systems remains to be seen.

So I think this (HTML5 support) is a work in progress and with time more and more features will get included in future releases of IE9 and other browsers. Based on the score from html5test, I think MicroSoft has a long way to go. But, better late then never...

What I liked about the IE9 though is the introduction of API which provides developers with the performance metrics like time taken for navigation, fetch, unload, domainlookup, connect, request, response, domLoading, domInteractive etc. You may read more here. I do agree that developers should not have to find the workaround to get these metrics and browser should make these available as it, the browser, already knows these numbers when it renders the pages. I think it is a step in the right direction and other browsers should also provide such API for developers.