Jeffrey Zeldman vs. Ed Bott

In his ZD Net Blog, Ed Bott stated:

In one breath he said, “I’m not challenging the quality of the hardware and software improvements,” and then, in the very next breath, he criticized Microsoft’s “brilliant browser engineers” for “torturing the IE rendering engine every couple of years instead of putting it out of its misery.”

This certainly seems damning. But it isn't quite true. Each of the quotes can be pulled from Zeldman's blog, IE9 Preview, but Bott's juxtaposition of Zeldman's words are downright deceptive. The two statements were separated by four paragraphs, so perhaps Bott quite understands what 'very next breath' means. Or more likely, Bott is being intentionally being misleading.

It is clear that Jeffrey Zeldman does respect Microsoft Engineering, and that he considers at least some of the Microsoft engineers to be brilliant.

Jeffrey Zeldman clearly states that he is writing in response to Dean Hachamovitch's report, An Early Look at IE9 for Developers. Zeldman's blog is dated 9 AM Eastern on 16 Mar 2010. Bott then launched into a description of Hachamovitch's presentation at MIX at Las Vagas. The talk was live blogged by Sharon Chan at 9:51 AM Pacific on 16 March 2010. Or about 4 hours after Zeldman posted his blog.

For some reason, Bott is surprised that Zelman didn't report on the still 4 hour in the future MIX talk. This is even more surprising since Bott was at the talk, so I would have expected him to note who was present in the room.

What there the significant changes that occurred between Hachamovitch's blog and his presentation at MIX? From what I can tell, the major changes introduced at the talk were all known at PDC 2009 (18 November 2009):

• html5
• SVG 1.1
• GPU rendering using Direct2D
• CSS3
• new JavaScript engine

These are good news. What has changed between November:

• improving Acid3 (which did improve from 32 to 55)
• support for CSS3 selectors (which improved from passing 574/578 tests to a perfect 578/578)

So, we are seeing IE9 making significant improvements in standards compliance. But this is just a start. To see how IE9 is faring on SVG 1.1, we can look at this recent blog at codedread. On the official SVG Test Suite, IE9 preview is scoring 28%, Firefox 3.7 scores 73%, Opera 10.5 scores 94%, Chrome 5 scores 87% and Safari 4 scores 82%. These numbers are quite different than the test results presented by Microsoft. Haavard noticed that before I did.

The Acid3 score of 55 is well below the scores of the production versions of Firefox 3.5 (94%), Opera (100%), Chrome (99%) and Safari (100%).

That still leaves JavaScript. In addition to speed, a a browser's JavaScript should conform to the ECMA standard. Google released the Sputnik JavaScript conformance test suite. The Chromium blog recently posted test results. The winner is Opera (78 failures) and the looser is IE8, with 463 failures. In terms of JavaScript performance, IE9 is now respectably fast. It is on par with the the other modern JavaScript engines.