Internet Explorer is a four-letter word in any Web developer’s dictionary. Between the sluggishness, CSS compatibility issues, and lack for JavaScript development tools the beloved Microsfot Web browser has give us quite the headache. With the upcoming release of IE9 many of us hoped for a product from Microsoft that would mimic our other favorite browsers giving us the peace of mind to develop for one unified environment and not worry about quirks, conditional comments and other hacks. But alas, we will have to keep hoping.

According to Freeciv.net, IE9 will not support HTML5’s best features at all - no canvas element, embedded video/audio, CSS3, storage or geolocation. In fact it sounds like IE9 is more of an IE8.1.

IE9 Platform Preview Results

I was tired of reading the compatibility results of others’ IE9 browsers and looking at them as piece-meal so I went ahead and installed IE9 in a VM and included my results from html5test.com below. As expected: barely any support.

How Lack of Standards Compatibility Affects Us All

Increased Cost

Lagging browser standards means you either have to use older technology (Flash instead of embedded video) or write dedicated code for alternative browsers. Using older technology is usually not as efficient and can take more time to develop. More code equals more cost. Also the quality-assurance process will take longer since it is another browser version without full support to test against.

Decreased Developer Moral

When you can’t use new technology such as HTML5 on a client project because you have to support IE you become frustrated and decide, “I will learn HTML5 when IE supports it since my clients will require IE support anyway”. This statement makes sense to many people since the reality is that you could learn something that you can use today (like a new library or framework) and wait until you are able to leverage HTML5 technology on all projects. But in the meantime you have to listen to everyone talk about how wonderful HTML5/CSS3 is on their projects where they do not require support for IE.

A Longer Wait for Client HTML5 Acceptance

People are still using IE6 even though it is no longer supported by many major Web sites. If IE10 is to fully support HTML5 we may be long into 2012 before we can comfortably develop sites fully in HTML5 without dedicated IE fixes. Yes, we can surely educate our clients about browser statistics and that most people use Firefox now, but you can’t completely ignore 30% of the browser market share.

Conclusion

So just as we were all getting excited about using our HTML5 skills in the next client project it looks like we’ll have to table that hope for another time. I’m pretty disappointed IE9 won’t support just about everything that is exciting about HTML5 and CSS3, so I’ll just continue promoting Google Chrome in the meantime.