Building great browsers together

Building a great browser is complex; this is valid for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and any other browser out there.

When we started the planning of IE9, we decided to offer more visibility to developers over the progress of the platform – releasing a Platform Preview every eight week. Thanks to your help, we collected thousands of feedbacks and lastly to make IE a better product. It’s been a great journey so far – the partnership IE Team-community has been working really well!

I just ran across an article from Mike Dewey. Forgetting for a moment about the “sensational title” (which btw is funny), I believe there are also a lot of interesting observations and feedbacks. I also like the approach of suggesting (for the time being) workarounds. Thanks Mike!

1 - “my application that appeared to be possessed by some insane daemon“

Lol. Do you have a repro test? Should we call the ghost-busters? Sorriso

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Seriously, let me explain what (probably) happened.

IE9 by default uses the IE9 Standards Engine, which supports all the great new HTML5 stuff. Thus, if you create a plain page with the correct doc-type and you publish it on your server, it will just work.

For compatibility reason, it also allow you to specify an older engine (IE8, IE7, IE Quirks) by using the X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Note that some website specify this rule “at a server level” by setting an HTTP header on all the pages. Bottom line: even in this case, you are in control of what engine you want to use.

2- globalCompositeOperation

As you noted, globalCompositeOperation is not supported in Platform Preview 7. Or, better, we support only the source-over state. We do care about supporting this property, but we also care about it being interoperable across all browsers.

At the time we announced and shipped support for the Canvas, the other browsers were supporting the globalCompositeOperation, but they didn’t have the same rendering behaviors – making developer life very complex. Chrome and Safari in fact implemented the drawing model differently from Opera and Firefox. You can still see this in action today. For instance, navigate to this site. Firefox 4.0b8 and Chrome Canary 10.0.638 are rendering different results. [We obviously looked at all other browsers, even if I don’t mention them in this post].

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Given that evident interoperability challenge, we decided it was critical to have first that conversations with the HTML Working Group – before shipping something unreliable for end-users.

Since then, we believe we made good progress – you should expect to hear more from us soon.

3 – Canvas Resizing

Good catch! It looks like you are hitting an old bug that has already been fixed (fix to come in the next build). If you see similar issues in the future, I’d strongly suggest to file a bug to Connect. More on “why Connect” at the bottom of this post.

4 – Limited Shadow Offset

I admit this is weird, but I can’t repro on my machine. It’s possible that this falls in the same bucket of (3).

What I noticed instead is that different browsers render your code in a different way. I created this dummy page using the code on your site (let me know if I missed something) and here’s what I get.

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Personally I believe Firefox is closest to the result I was expecting. What do you think?

Microsoft Connect

As you know, we highly appreciate developer feedbacks and we encourage you to try (and try to break if you want) the Platform Previews of IE9.

Remember you can download the latest build from www.ietestdrive.com and you can file a bug on Microsoft Connect. This will ensure that:

  1. The IE team get direct visibility (and can eventually follow up if more info are needed)
  2. Other users can rate the bug (which helps a lot!)
  3. Users have visibility over the progress of open/closed bugs

Again, thanks Mike for your feedbacks. Looking forward to the next build!