For all the misrepresentation of facts and existing browser inconsistencies i'm just happy that microsoft has apparently started caring about the browser again.

While this is obviously tailored to things that microsoft is doing I wouldn't be surprised if these features end up in the hands of actual users through other browsers first.

Microsoft's upgrade policy for IE is extremely conservative which gives the other browser vendors plenty of time to add in the features and release them to people before Microsoft does.

How does it feel to have a company other than Google create tests specifically designed for the features they implemented?

Obviously Microsoft only presented tests that they have passed and at least one other major browser has failed. Still this is free QA for the other browsers so there is not much room to complain.

Just to be clear, these are tests created and submitted by Microsoft themselves, so it's not so surprising that IE9 passes all of them as it otherwise might be.

Beautiful, I'm happy for MS to make IE9 comply with all this new stantards. Now, I leave you. I have to spend the rest of the evening trying to make a site to work and render correctly in IE6, IE7 & IE8 (at the same time). :(

Ok they are comparing beta/preview version of IE with stable version or not even recent versions of browsers?

The current beta/dev version of Chrome is 5 not 4.1. The current FF nightly build is 3.7a5 not 3.6.3, the current stable Opera version is 10.6.3 not 10.5.2.

As usual, more FUD from microsoft.

why all this hate? maybe they are trying to comply with standards, maybe it will help, maybe we will not have to work twice to align the f CSS on IE? At least this is their formal goal and these are very good news.

How many important W3C tests pass on windows XP running IE9?

None... (IE9 wont run on XP)

How many important W3C tests pass on windows XP running Firefox 3.6?

Most...

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And according to Wikipedia as of April the XP has a OS market share of 52.94% This value is the median of 7 different data sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

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What this means is that by Microsoft refusing to make IE9 available for XP, web developers often can't take advantage of CSS3 or HTML5 and still reach even 70% of the audience.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/chrome-continu...

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I would tend to agree with pavs that this is more FUD from Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Has IE suddenly become the most standards compliant browser, or is there some subtlety here that's missing?

I'll take this seriously when they support the existing standards properly. Stacks of HTML/CSS/JavaScript books are full of pages saying this/that doesn't work in IE.

Hilarious!

Such irony. We respect how challenging it is to build one page that works the same in every browser as the technology advances and customer expectations rise.

Then what's stopping them from including IE6,7 and 8 in their "tests" and fixing this whole mess they created in the beginning. They act like those previous products aren't their responsibility... fucking joke

Using Firefox 3.6.3 here, the same they listed.

I tried the "Call select() on a text field" test because it looked like a simple one I could check myself.

It selects the text field perfectly. When I start typing the current text is replaced, everything seems to be working fine. "Test result: FAIL"

It's only one test, sure, but this page is smelling even fishier than before.

This works just fine for me on FF: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5/selecti... I am guessing they put in some tricks in the validation here too.

hardware acceleration is the big one. This will force the hand of the other browser makers to follow suite. Webkit is already pretty far along here but only css animations, not the entire rendering pipe, which seems to be what the IE team has managed to do.

Although MS's "Testing Center" is fixed in IE's favor, their IEBlog does compare IE to the latest competitor releases and "showcases" IE's poor Acid3 performance. [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/]

This is really good news.

Microsoft is excellent at producing software that ticks feature boxes. Anyone who remembers magazine reviews of Excel vs Lotus 123 will remember the relentless way MS would improve in the comparison tables in every release until suddenly they were ahead. The same thing happened in the original browser wars.

The problem is that Microsoft has never been good at choosing which feature boxes need ticking themselves.

But now they have decided to care about list of features called "HTML5" they should be able to push things forward well. (I'm hoping anyway. And I'm hoping "Canvas" makes that feature list)

It says that firefox and webkit browsers fail on border-radius, that's only because they use -webkit-border-radius and -mozilla-border-radius and Microsoft only tested border-radius which is the one supported by IE, not very honnest especially knowing that gecko and webkit had those for years before IE.

Why they are so shy? We all know that it was Microsoft who was invented the Internet, created HTML, Javascript and their browser is the most secure, fast and reliable one.