Webkit is primarily developed by Google and Apple. While it is open source, it’s been clear that both Google and Apple have significant control over the development direction, which is why webkit was split from KHtml.

The IE team is already working on CSS3 support for IE9, which they mentioned in the post.

For the status of HTML5 and additional CSS3 features, questions should be directed to the w3c. Unlike other browser vendors, Microsoft has been sued and fined for not adhearing to web standards. Since HTML5 and many portions of CCS3 aren’t a CR, Microsoft faces potential legal issues should the standards change before it becomes a CR. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s already happened to Microsoft multiple times. Keep in mind, HTML5 likely won’t be a CR until 2012.

The team has also made posts about IE6, which I linked to in my post. Microsoft is legally bound to support IE6 for as long as they support Windows XP. This is why every IE newer than 7 isn’t integrated into the Windows OS. It prevents mutual support issues.

As far as version numbers go, they make sense to me.

IE7 was obviously a completely different browser than IE6

IE8 added full CSS2.1 support, doubled javscript performance, added the color-coded tabs, web slices and several other new features.

IE9 will support all CSS3 CR specifications, correct rendering for fonts, as well as another huge boost in javascript and rendering performance.

Microsoft and the IE Team has repeatedly agreed with the dev community that IE6 sucks. However, contrary to popular belief, they don’t have the magical ability to force everybody to upgrade.

As I said in my post, most of these arguments / issues have already been addressed by Microsoft and the IE team. However, it’s easier to make a 2 sentence comment on a blog than take the time to actually research what web standards are actually standards.

For example:

* Why not use WebKit? (Microsoft’s going open… this would seem to fit in the strategy, wouldn’t it?)

* What’s the status of some of the more innovative HTML5/CSS3 features that other browsers are trying to adopt (video, canvas, SVG, etc.)?

A nice blog post from the team detailing their perspectives on each version – and why each version is its own version – would be nice, too. They could answer the following for those who can’t read: why do you still support IE6? Why not make IE 8.1 instead of IE 9? What are the major differences between IE 6 – 9, and will we have to test against 4 different versions of IE?

There comes a time when you just have to admit that there are shortcomings in your earlier products, but that you’re trying to make progress. It’s hard for an outfit like Microsoft to do, but I think it’s necessary if they ever want to win back the support of web devs.

I’m just glad we’re not still going 5 years between browser releases. The web is changing too fast for tech to stay stagnant, and in this market, standards-compliant competition (Firefox at ~19% and Safari at ~6%) is a very, very good thing.

This is a good thing.

IE7 and IE8 were major improvements, and it looks like they’re addressing the right things in IE9. I’m looking forward to widespread support and use of CSS3, and font-smoothing will make a lot of designers happy.

I think some developers have gotten so used to either exploiting or working around IE issues that standards compliance actually becomes an afterthought. Some people I’ve talked to don’t even run their pages through the W3C validator. It’s a shame, but hopefully with better browsers, curmudgeon developers will start to get it, be weeded out, or made irrelevant.

However, IE6 would be easy to kill if a few vendors got together to kill it. If there was a kill IE6 day, where a significant number of sites made the decision to kill IE6 support on the same day, it would be a pretty effective way of getting rid of it. The only way to kill it is to make it useless to everybody, not just web developers.

I think the negativity comes more from the sense that Microsoft has typically always done what they wanted and didn’t care what the user thought. It has really only been somewhat recently that MS has become transparent to show the world what they’re doing as far as meeting the users wants/needs. The “screw web standards” mentality has stuck with them for better or worse and probably mostly at this point because they refuse to kill IE6. And don’t forget you’re always going to have the “PCs are better” and “Macs are better” crowds.

I myself am excited for IE9 and think they make leaps and bounds with every new release. People forget that really large organizations take a lot longer to adopt change/new mindsets (web standards) than the open source community, such as Mozilla.