They may have arrived late to the party, but Microsoft are keen to make their presence known, and in an effort to show just how engaged with the web standards community they are, or perhaps more a chance to try and gain one up on the competition, have published a set of results (on the 5th may) outlining not only how great IE9’s performance in a number of test cases is, but also just how badly the competition compare.



The results, summarised above, show how the IE9 preview performed in a series of test cases for various web standards, including CSS3 and HTML5. As you may expect, as the test cases were developed and released by Microsoft, IE9 passed with flying colours scoring 100% across the range of tests.

Unfortunately a number of blogs / websites have miss-quoted these results, claiming that IE9, at least according to Microsoft, has 100% HTML5 and CSS3 compliance, and perhaps, dare I say it, this is exactly the kind of publicity the Microsoft marketing team were hoping for. Needless to say, these articles have caused a fair amount of controversy, and in some cases backlash against Microsoft, with one particular article (which has since been edited) attracting over 100 comments and even The Inquirer joining the fray, branding the results as “dodgy.”

The truth of the matter is that whilst IE9 does score 100% in each of the test cases shown by the table, these test cases only test a tiny subset of HTML5 / CSS3 features and there are countless other scenarios and test cases where the other browsers out-perform IE9. Whilst the way the results are presented may be somewhat misleading, nowhere in the publication of the results do Microsoft actually claim 100% compliance with CSS3 or HTML5, and it is not unusual practice for browser vendors to list their results in a manner that show them in a better light than their competitors. After all, you’d hardly expect Microsoft to publish a table showing a long list of failures for IE9.

So, whilst these results may not be quite as exciting as some would have you believe, it is worth noting that this is still a vast turnaround from Microsoft’s previous position on CSS3, and web standards in general. This may only be a small step, compared to those taken by other browser vendors (namely Opera, Mozilla, Webkit), but is a step in the right direction and good news for CSS3 fans that Microsoft is finally taking web standards seriously.

What’s that on the horizon? Is it truly a world of cross-browser CSS3 compatibility? Perhaps, but it’s still a long way off yet, and anything could happen before we get there.

Update:It appears that this article, or rather my overuse of the word “whilst” in the article, has also caused some controversy over on reddit.