Mozilla Firefox overtaken – browser wars

The W3C have performed an HTML5 test on web browsers which includes top browser like Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Opera,  and Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has been the most irritating browser to use and is a bitter pill for web designers who have to find ways of working around its lack of conformance with web standards such HTML, CSS3, SVG, DOM and so on and so forth.

Microsoft in its push to catch up with HTML5 has seen a dramatic drift as Microsoft has switched to pushing HTML5 standards over its own proprietary Silverlight web-replacement plug-in. Microsoft has also changed its mind about supporting Canvas. What is Canvas? Canvas is an element of HTML5 that enables creating of dynamic, scriptable rendering of two-dimensional shapes and bitmaps within web pages. Canvas was originally created by Apple and was contributed royalty-free to the HTML5 specification. It also enables HTML5 developers to create animations and games without needing a plugin helper like Flash or Silverlight.

Internet Explorer 9 has been released with better speeds, a drain on your graphical resources but still lacks HTML5. However, Internet Explorer 9 is still acing HTML5 tests. Escalating its position from last to first, this is because the W3C test suite for HTML5 has been written by Microsoft, the company has also contributed a number of the test cases. If you are experienced with browsers you will probably wonder how Microsofts Internet explorer can overtake favourite browsers like Mozilla Firefox. You should know that the Microsoft test for HTML5 ignores features that are vital to real-world web applications, like drag and drop support, Web Workers, the File API, local storage, CSS3 transformations and other animation techniques. Microsoft has also failed to report Internet Explorers performance in other tests which are not part of their written test suite.

This just shows Internet Explorers inability to support web standards like the other browsers like in the official SVG test suite Internet Explorer ranked last, with browsers like Opera, Chrome and Safari gaining ground over Mozilla Firefox. So the browser wars continue and I highly doubt if Internet Explorer will conform with the web standards to eventually come at the top without having to only sit and pass the test they have written for themselves.