With IE9, Microsoft gambles on HTML5, H.264 video

Earlier this month, Microsoft issued its second developer-oriented preview release of Internet Explorer 9.0. You can take it out for a test-drive or see the demos on the test site, which displays performance enhancements, HTML5 interoperability (causing a bit of a stir), and graphical demonstrations.

Yielding to standards

In a quest to amend the company’s reputation for ignoring Web standards, Microsoft has provided more than 7,000 new compliance tests to the W3C, the standards body in charge of finalizing the in-progress HTML5 and CSS3 standards. Microsoft hopes its support for HTML5, DOM, and CSS3, in addition to new compatibility with a host of other standards-based HTML, scripting, and formatting, wil improve its Acid3 scores (a common though oft-criticized test of standards compliance for browsers). Currently, the IE9 beta scores of 68 out of 100, a far cry from Firefox 3.6’s score of 94 but a huge jump from IE8’s score of 20 and IE7’s score of 14.

[ InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister explains what to expect in HTML5 — and why today’s HTML is so messy to work with. | Keep up on the latest Windows news and insights with InfoWorld’s Technology: Windows newsletter. ]

Ultimately, standards are established so that developers can create sites that function and interoperate well without making too many — or in a perfect world, any — modifications for different browsers. Personally, I have a developer who usually jumps through hoops to make sure my site is viewable in IE, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari, and I’m sure you go through the same hassle. All that repeated testing steals time and effort away from creativity, so a closer connection to standards on IE’s part would be much appreciated.

Creative performance gains

IE9 is using a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that was designed to improve the speed of script processing. (Oddly enough, “chakra” is a Sanskrit word that means “wheel” or “turning,” according to Wikipedia. The name likely refers to the vortex of energy in Hindu spiritualism, not “spinning the wheel” — oh well.) One thing Chakra does is run a separate background thread in tandem with other processes on another core if one is available, taking advantage of the current multicore systems that many users now have.

IE9 is the first browser to support a GPU for hardware-accelerated SVG support. (SVG is the Scalable Vector Graphics fomat natively supported by all of IE’s competitors; IE9 finally closes that gap.) No longer relegated to just video games, which tend to use vector graphics, GPU-based acceleration is one of the hot performance technologies gaining mainstream app adoption, such as in Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s Windows 7. IE9 also now uses Windows’ vector-oriented DirectX as its rendering engine rather than Windows’ old-time, pixel-oriented GDI engine. These two changes should enhance IE’s performance and let developers safely add more bling to their sites.

Betting the farm on HTML5 and H.264

With devices like the iPad turning their back on Flash support, HTML5 is now very much in the spotlight. Today, sites that support HTML5 video are few and far between, and the technology base is not there yet to let HTML5 video widely supplant Flash video, notes Justin Eckhouse, the senior product manager for video and mobile at CBS Interactive.

In a panel last week at the Streaming Media Conference in New York, Eckhouse said Apple’s move to require the use of HTML5’s video tag and the H.264 video codec made his team work hard to put together a dirty HTML5 site in two weeks’ time and support a modicum of content for the iPad. But the controls and features for HTML5 video are nothing like what exists for the Flash platform, and he expects it will be a couple of years before HTML5 development catches up (and surpasses) the work that many have done with Flash video streaming.

It’s no surprise that Microsoft will support HTML5 in IE9, but it is surprising that Microsoft will back just the H.264 codec. HTML5 doesn’t specify any particular format for video, but Microsoft has decided that H.264 is an industry standard with strong support and very explicitly defined intellectual property rights.

“The rights to other codecs are often less clear,” says Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer. “H.264 video offers a more certain path than other video formats and does so in a way that delivers a great HTML5 experience for developers and users,” he adds.

Obviously, plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight, and others will still be supported, so unlike the iPad and iPhone, users aren’t limited to H.264-encoded video. But only the H.264 video codec gets native support in IE9 as a feature developers know they can count on.

How does IE9 rate so far?

So does the current IE9 beta currently get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down? I liked it, so thumbs-up.

That was no sure thing. For several years I got so tired of IE’s issues that I ran to Firefox. It was the first application I installed whenever I got a new system. I’d launch IE just once: to download Firefox. Google Chrome tweaked my interest, but Firefox seemed better than everyone else — until crash after crash helped me make the jump to IE8. Since then, I’ve been incredibly satisfied with IE, especially IE8’s accelerators and several other features.

But I’m now ready for a change and a new browser experience that goes beyond the existing limitations and takes advantage of the powerful hardware we have at our disposal, one that takes the focus off the compatibility issues of cross-browser support and puts the attention back on developing great sites, regardless of the browser used. That could be IE9.

I like that IE9 is moving in all the right directions. I know I’ll have to wait for the final version before I can praise the end result, but I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far.

This article, “With IE9, Microsoft gambles on HTML5, H.264 video,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com.