After such a long time in Release Preview, Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 users so I thought I would take a quick look at how it stacks up against the competition, especially from a software developer’s point of view.
In the past you may have seen that software and websites work with “any modern browser”. This is often code for any browser not from Microsoft. Actually it is not really a fair accusation to say that older versions of Internet Explorer are bad, a lot of them were OK at the time they were released. I think a lot of the negativity comes from the development community who have to make their software work on old browsers that are still in use today. Microsoft made this 10 times worse when they decided not to let Windows XP users upgrade past IE8.
This means that the hundreds of millions of computers that are using XP are left in the dark ages if they want to continue using a Microsoft browser. (Note: If you are using windows XP and any version of IE8 and below, I cannot recommend highly enough for you to upgrade to Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera. Your web experience will be massively improved).
Microsoft may have done this again with IE9 potentially being the last update for Windows Vista. It is not a significant problem yet as IE9 is an OK browser but in the future we will be have with another group of computer users stuck with outdated browser technology.
All software companies have a strategy on when to discontinue support for old browsers (that does not necessarily mean that updated software will not work on older browsers); in RedTie’s case for our Web to Print software we use global usage statistics as our metric. IE7, which is nearly 7 years old, has finally passed that point of no support.
You may wonder, as software developers, why we hope that old browsers will disappear. Actually it is the new features in HTML5 and CSS3 that we have big plans for. They are going to make features available in web based applications, like our Web to Print software, that were never possible in the past. Therefore the only thing we have to wait for before implementing the new features is that the majority of our customers' clients are using modern browsers that support those features.
Moving on to IE10, if you are using Windows 7 you should be upgraded automatically through the Windows update process and if you are using Windows 8 then IE10 is already installed. If you can’t wait you can just visit windows.microsoft.com and download a copy. Installation is painless and the first time you use it you may be hard pressed to notice the difference between IE9 and IE10. It might load a little quicker than IE9, Microsoft claim speed is improved up to 20% over the older browser.
The really good news is that IE10 has automatic updating turned on by default, something that a modern browser really needs if it wants to keep up with the ever changing HTML5 and CSS3 standards. Sadly a lot of corporations will turn this off.
Most importantly is how the browser fares with HTML5 and CSS3. There has to be a disclaimer here, both of these standards are not completely finished, so making a browser fully compliant with them is like trying to hit a moving target.
First up HTML5, using www.html5test.com, we can see that with a score of 320 out of 500 it is much more compliant than IE9 which had a score of 139. That is a huge and much welcomed improvement. Sadly, even though it has only just been released, it is way behind the latest additions of every other major browser.
Next I looked at CSS3, using the browser test on css3test.com and comparing it to a few other browsers I have installed on my PC (there can be variations based on the setup of your computer so these are not set in stone). I got the following:
Actually this looks much better for IE10, it is much closer to the competition, and even though the IE10 is in last place I think this is a fairly healthy result.
So to the question, is IE10 'any modern browser'? The simple answer would be yes, it is some way off being the best browser and Microsoft will have to auto update it much more frequently than they ever have done in the past with their browsers in order to maintain the 'modern browser' tag, but it is a great start.
If you have a choice you will probably be better off with Google Chrome, but if you must use Microsoft then IE10 is by far your best choice.
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