Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #3

February 05, 2008

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

Building on the momentum created by the release of Internet Explorer 7, which included major advances in CSS support, the IE team began work on a completely new rendering engine for IE8—one that followed the CSS 2.1 spec as closely as possible. The culmination of their efforts is a browser capable of rendering the Acid2 test accurately. For those of you keeping track, this means that IE will soon support generated content and data URLs, and, it has been confirmed, will banish hasLayout forever. This will put its rendering on par with other browsers that have passed Acid2, including Safari, iCab, Konqueror, and Opera. (Firefox 3, which passes Acid2, had not been released as of this writing.)

Compatibility and IE8

In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier.

Unpacking Internet Explorer 8’s multiple rendering modes

When IE8 eventually ships, it will have three rendering modes, two of which are the already familiar “quirks mode” and “(not so) standards mode.” In an IE team blog entry, IE Platform Architect Chris Wilson revealed a third mode that can be invoked by developers: 1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content. 2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content. 3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta /> element.

The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini

Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.

Firefox 3 beta 3 code freeze tonight

[...]decided that we’re still going to do a Beta 3 code freeze tonight, but will be adding at least one more milestone [...] before moving on to Release Candidate builds.

Our goal is to do a quick turnaround on Firefox 3 Beta 4, but we cannot provide a good estimate until we know the size and scope of blockers remaining after the Beta 3 codefreeze. [...] As soon as we know more about the schedule for this beta, we’ll post here and on the mozilla.dev.planning group.

Firefox share up over 20% in Europe, mostly at expense of IE

XiTi’s breakdown of monthly Firefox market share gains for the past year show that the browser climbed from about 20 percent two years ago to 23.1 percent in December 2006 to a record 28 percent in December 2007. Firefox market share hit a plateau and hovered around 27.7 percent between June and September before taking a 0.7 percent drop in October, but then recovered prior to reaching 28 percent last month.

Browser Newsletter #3

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

Compatibility and IE8

Unpacking Internet Explorer 8’s multiple rendering modes

The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini

Firefox 3 beta 3 code freeze tonight

Firefox share up over 20% in Europe, mostly at expense of IE

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