01 June 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

HTML5 will be at the heart of IE9's success claims director

Microsoft is hopeful that next year's Internet Explorer 9 will revitalise its web browser's market share, which has fallen from 90 per cent down to 60. According to IE's senior director, Ryan Gavin, the success of IE9 will be down to its integration of HTML5.

"We're all in on HTML5," Gavin told the Guardian.

"We've been co-chairing the HTML5 working group, and we're actually leading the HTML5 testing group. With CSS 2.1, we've submitted 7,000 test cases to the W3C. We're actively participating with other browser vendors to get consistency across browsers. The goal is 'same markup'."

Microsoft has launched a Test Drive site to preview its forthcoming browser, which seems to demonstrate that IE9 is implementing HTML5 standards more effectively than its rivals. The preview also trumps Google Chrome for speed, but is still falling behind in some areas of the Acid3 test.

"We're using real-world customer data to inform our vision [for IE9], but as we focus on standards and markup, as a by-product, our Acid3 scores go up," Gavin explained, saying that the company is testing against thousands of real-world sites rather than optimising for benchmark tests.

"There are dozens of subsystems that make up the real-world performance of a browser - which is not just speed - and JavaScript can be as little as 5 per cent.

"Rendering matters a ton. Layout matters a ton. It varies site by site. Looking at one specific test is a very narrow view of the web."

The evolution of the web is also being touted as the reason for the flagging performance of the outdated IE6, which even Microsoft is keen to steer away from - though many companies are still using the browser due to its compatibility with Windows XP. With the news that IE9 will not be supported by XP, Microsoft is making a gambit that more users will upgrade their operating system to Windows 7.

"IE6 was built for a very different web at a very different time," Gavin said.

"A modern web does require a modern browser. My aim is to get IE6's market share to zero as fast as humanly possible. That's good for the web, good for developers, and good for us."

Microsoft says the preview of IE9 has been downloaded more than a million times since it was launched on 15 March. However, the company's introduction of a browser ballot screen in March, following a ruling by European antitrust officials, has also seen more Windows users in Europe experimenting with alternatives to Internet Explorer.

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