'IE8 is already obsolete'

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As many of you might have noticed today Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8. Tristan Nitot (founder and chairman of Mozilla Europe) made the statement 'IE8 is already obsolete' in the podcast ICT Roddels (the podcast is Dutch in general, however the 1 hour session in episode 257 with Tristan Nitot is in English).

Why would IE8 be obsolete? Because IE8 has not implement at least three important things:

SVG which enables drawing lines and shapes in your browser (it is used in Google Earth).
HTML5 Video tag which enables native open video, without e.g. flash. (see also this previous blog about the video tag)
HTML 5 Canvas which also enables drawing on a screen and rastering images. It is pixel based instead of lines and shapes as in SVG.

The implementation of canvas and the video tag in most browsers (except IE) makes it for example possible to do special effects in video via javascript and canvas. Which is really a great improvement and gets on step closer to a browser based netbook OS.

Microsoft has a hard time to keep up with the other players (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari) in the market, especially since Microsoft stopped (or did very little) working on the browser for some time after IE5.5 / IE6.0. Can Microsoft still compete with the other players? Is IE8 already obsolete, although it has new features as accelerators, web slices and visual search? Is Tristan Nitot right when he says "old slow Microsoft"?

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 19, 2009 in Internet Business | Digg this | Seed Newsvine

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Comments

# on March 19, 2009 11:13 PM, stelt said:

Tristan is right on this.
IE keeps losing marketshare :-)
With the SVG worldconference this year at Google, expect interesting stuff.

# on March 20, 2009 11:52 AM, Aurélien said:

drawing lines and shapes, showing video... Eh eh you can do it in IE too. Just install Silverlight. This Microsoft (copyright) technology is very good at this.

Why would you want them to implement it in an open way?

Microsoft is having a really hard time with broswer. IE must be good enough to prevent users from switching to non Microsoft browser. And IE must also remain bad enough to prevent the browser to become THE platform instead of the OS.

# on March 20, 2009 4:20 PM, Rick Mans said:

Hi Aurélien

Thanks for your reply. The issue with Silverlight is that is not native and that it does not work on all platforms. The video and canvas taga are both native in HTML5, no extras required, just native browser behavior. And why should we use an extra closed solution as we already have Flash, Flex (and other likewise Adobe products) that offer almost exact the same functionality as Silverlight.

I agree with you on your last alinea. The OS is one of the products that are taking for a lot of revenue. On the other hand is Microsoft also aiming more at the web / Internet as a platform and I therefore think they will gradually go to more standard compliance with their browser. Simply because they have to.