At last year's PDC, held in November, Microsoft showed a graph showing scores of a variety of Web browsers in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, to show off the progress that the company was making with Internet Explorer 9. Another such graph was shown off at the recent MIX event. What was most interesting about the graph was not IE9's progress, but Opera's.

Opera 10.10, released at about the same time as Microsoft held its PDC event, fared pretty badly. Faster than IE8, but slower than everything else, including the (private) PDC IE9 build. Opera 10.50, released a few weeks ago? It's the fastest browser on the chart. It's faster even than prerelease versions of Firefox and Chrome, not to mention faster than the public IE9 Platform Preview build. SunSpider isn't the be-all/end-all of JavaScript performance, and it fails to represent real-world scenarios in a number of ways. However, it's clear that Opera's JavaScript performance has improved substantially over the period of about six months.

And most significantly, these improvements are now in people's hands. 10.50 isn't some preview release. It's a released, stable version of the browser.

This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Redmond promoted the JavaScript performance of IE8 in the run-up to its release, too. The result? By the time IE8 was released, or shortly after, competing browsers had once again overtaken it, with stable, shipping versions outpacing Microsoft's efforts.

By taking the approach of infrequent, but substantial releases, Internet Explorer users are being denied timely access to much of the progress that Microsoft is making, and hence denied the ability to take advantage of IE9's greater standards compliance.

We see similar situations, albeit with fewer easy-to-use graphs, when we look at how well other browsers implement SVG, or CSS, or HTML5. The current stable releases of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are all streets ahead of the current stable version of IE. Make no mistake: these other browsers do not provide complete, systematic, exhaustive implementations of these specifications (though Opera's SVG support is not far off). But they are already providing extensive capabilities, not to mention impressive performance, to Web developers. And they're doing so today.

But Microsoft? IE9 is going to provide thorough, complete implementations of many of these specifications. This is certainly a good thing. It's what all browsers should strive to be doing. But Microsoft isn't going to release these features piecemeal. The current IE9 engine is already a huge improvement over IE8, but its preview status makes it irrelevant. We don't know when IE9 will be finished—2011 seems the earliest possibility, and there's an outside chance that it won't be until 2012 that IE9 ships.

In the meantime, we get nothing from Redmond.

This approach sets Microsoft apart from the other browser vendors. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all get regular updates. I don't just mean security fixes, though they get those too—they get regular feature updates that improve their performance, improve their standards compliance, and improve their user interfaces. Firefox, for example, had release 3.0 in July 2008, 3.5 in June 2009, and 3.6 in January 2010. Opera 9.5 was released in September 2007, with 10.0 in September 2009, 10.10 in November 2009, and 10.50 in March 2010.

Over a similar time frame, Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006, IE8 in March 2009. And now nothing further is likely until 2011.

There's a similar discrepancy when it comes to support. Firefox 3.0 is going to receive its last-ever patch at the end of the month—a total supported lifetime of a little under two years. Internet Explorer 6, released in 2001, is still supported by Microsoft. It's old, its use is thoroughly discouraged, but it's also a part of Windows XP, and since Windows XP is supported, so is IE6.

Avoiding moving targets

Microsoft's approach is that it wants to build stable, consistent platforms. It is important to Microsoft that IE8 is, for example, a known target that developers can aim for, without there being a series of 8.1, 8.2, 8.3... point releases that might improve features, but also create more targets for developers, and not the stable, consistent platform that Microsoft wants to provide. It would also incur substantial support overheads.

The attitude is one that makes sense for Windows or Office. There are platforms that push out updates more regularly (Ubuntu, for example, has a regular six-month release cycle), but both of the two major desktop operating systems (Windows and Mac OS X) have lengthier release cycles. But the difference with these platforms is that in a sense they're more arbitrary. Microsoft and Apple get to pick the direction of their future OSes, and each new release introduces a raft of new—proprietary—features. There's no real benefit to releasing piecemeal updates in the same way.

But that's not the case for Web browsers. We have a fairly good idea what the target is, because the target isn't defined by the vendor. It's defined by W3C. Regular updates, making progress towards the various Web standards, are, in my view, a lot more useful. Microsoft's desire to have exhaustively tested, complete implementations of each part of each spec is laudable, and that should certainly be the ultimate goal, but fundamentally, partial implementations are still useful. By taking the approach of infrequent but substantial releases, Internet Explorer users are being denied timely access to much of the progress that Microsoft is making, and hence denied the ability to take advantage of IE9's greater standards compliance.

We've written before that Microsoft's approach to browser development does not engage Web developers as thoroughly as it could. To an extent, the decision with IE9 to produce this platform preview, and to update it every eight weeks, goes some way towards addressing this. Microsoft says that the eight-week cycle is the one that will make feedback manageable and allow the most effective involvement with the process. Sure, it'd be nice if we could see the progress more regularly (something like Chrome's dev channel would seem an ideal compromise), but the platform preview nonetheless represents progress on Microsoft's part.

Getting developers involved is only part of the story, though. Getting features into end users' hands is valuable, and perhaps the most important thing that a browser vendor can do. Having a fast, standards compliant browser engine is only useful if it's shipping and available, and making Web users wait two or three years between releases just isn't good enough. To get people energised and actually in favor of IE, Microsoft needs to retake the position it once had: the best, most compliant, most stable, fastest browser around. During the browser war era it held this position. But those days are long gone.