Just a few days back an evangelist at Mozilla had stated that Internet Explorer 9, although a step in the right direction, could not be considered as a modern browser.
Microsoft has responded to this with a blog post at MSDN, and listed some salient features which it believe users and developers expect from a “modern browser”. According to Microsoft:
- Modern browsers are fast. They take full advantage of the underlying platform to render graphics with the GPU, compile and execute JavaScript across multiple CPU cores and ensure that web applications run as close as possible to the same speed as native applications.
- Modern browsers enable rich, immersive experiences that could hitherto only be delivered through a plug-in or native application. They can blend video, vector and raster graphics, audio and text seamlessly without sacrificing performance.
- Modern browsers implement features when they are ready, providing predictable patterns that developers can rely on rather than suddenly breaking or removing specifications. They don’t check off support based on a half-completed implementation written to pass a synthetic test, but validate against a test suite that confirms interoperability.
- Modern browsers do adopt standards at an early stage of readiness so developers can experiment and validate the specification, but clearly delineate unstable prototypes as such.
Says Time Sneath on MSDN – To our friends at Mozilla, we admire your passion for the open web, and we look forward to continued competition.
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