Internet Explorer

MIX09 recap: plenty for developers, designers

It’s sometimes hard at a conference to see the forest for the trees. With two-hour keynotes and session after session, it’s not easy to keep perspective on what’s big and what’s ancillary. And so, now that I’m back in Boston and recovered from the redeye, here’s my take on last week.

Most of the action was concentrated on the first day of MIX09: the biggest highlights were two new features in Blend Expression 3, SuperPreview and SketchFlow — but Silverlight 3 and Web App Installer also raised some eyebrows. On the other hand, the official launch of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was a bit anticlimactic.

SuperPreview is Microsoft’s answer to a problem that has dogged Web developers for about as long as they’ve been around: browser incompatibilities. SuperPreview lets designers see how two browsers render a given page by viewing the comparisons side by side or overlaid. The tool can also send HTML to a server and get the rendered image back, letting designers compare browsers that aren’t installed on their computers. That’s useful for comparing different versions of Internet Explorer, for instance, or even seeing how IE on Windows compares to Safari on a Mac.

Selecting a component in one browser preview highlights that component in the other browser’s rendering, letting developers quickly hone in one problem areas. But for now, SuperPreview only shows developers where the inconsistencies are; it doesn’t tell them how to fix the problems.

You can download SuperPreview as a standalone from Microsoft.

SketchFlow, the other new feature in Expression Blend 3, lets designers quickly prototype UIs by defining a flowchart that describes an application’s screens. You can also assign behaviors to buttons that can change a screen’s state or transition to another screen, giving clients a good sense of an application’s flow without you having to write any code.

One nice touch in SketchFlow is that Microsoft has included a new “wiggly” theme for controls that makes them look hand-drawn. That should help cut down on clients that don’t understand the difference between a prototype and a finished product: SketchFlow prototypes look more like drawings on digital napkins than software applications. On the other hand, SketchFlow projects are full-fledged Expression Blend applications, so you can use them as a starting point when you’re ready to write the real program.

So far, SketchFlow is see-don’t-touch: Microsoft had plenty of demonstrations throughout the week, but the bits aren’t shipping yet.

I’ve already talked about Silverlight 3 and the Web App Installer in my coverage of the MIX09 keynote, but they’re worth a quick mention here. Silverlight 3 includes lots of eye candy as well some important tools for developers. For instance, you’ll be able to write one data validation method that will run on both the client and the server. Microsoft also complemented the new Silverlight preview with improvements to the IIS Media Pack, including DVR-type pausing and playback of live streams.

The Web App Installer is a quick and easy way to deploy Web applications to your server, including applications not built on ASP.NET. The installer takes care of dependencies, so installing WordPress will automatically download and install PHP on your Windows server, too.

If there was one disappointment last week, it was the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday. It’s not so much that IE 8 is a bad browser — although it still lacks the extensibility that FireFox’s extensions provide — but the browser has already been in beta for months. The most exciting feature for designers is IE 8’s Developer Tools, which we’ve already seen. The buzz seems to be giving IE 8 the Vista treatment: blogs are calling its launch a failure and arguing that it hasn’t brought enough to the table to quell Firefox’s steady gain on the market.

Microsoft releases IE8; fixes and breaks standards compliance

LAS VEGAS — The final version of Internet Explorer 8 is out, and Microsoft spent today’s keynote showing off its full CSS 2.1 compliance, faster speeds and developer tools. But just as he finished talking about standards compliance, Microsoft IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch introduced a few new features that show just how hard real standards compliance are in the browser market.

First, the good news: IE8 is a major improvement over its predecessor. It’s faster, has plenty of handy features and comes with built-in developer tools. We covered IE8’s developer tools a few months ago, when it was still in beta; some of its new security features include recognizing malware sites and graying out all but the top level domain (TLD) in the URL bars, which will make it easier to notice phishing attacks. Chrome enthusiasts will be interested to learn that IE8 borrowed one of Chrome’s most compelling features: each tab is now a self-contained process, so a crash on one page won’t take down the whole browser.

The browser is also more compliant: Microsoft says it passes all of the 7201 tests it came up with and submitted to W3C, the body that sets Web standards.

But IE8 also has three new features called Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. These enable sites to repackage themselves in interesting ways. For instances, IE8 sports a toolbar similar to the menu bar for Slices, which act as minature Web sites; clicking on one of these buttons shows its content, which can contain anything from news updates to an in-depth search field. It’s all very cool, and only IE8 supports it.

And that’s the kicker: Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search aren’t standards compliant, because IE8 is the only browser that supports them. Yes, they’re all based on standard XML; but that only takes you so far. That takes us to the real question: are the W3C’s standards the ones that count, or the de facto standards set by browsers?

The point of standards is to simplify development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the rest should be “write once, run anywhere,” to borrow Java’s infamous mantra. The best way to do that is to agree on the standards and then write software to match them: Microsoft has done that for CSS, but its unilateral introduction of Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search show that realpolitik is still very much alive in the browser wars.

My guess is that browsers will never be fully compliant, and that’s a good thing. If each browser were really compliant — if it rendered the standards perfectly and nothing else — there’d be very little room for experimentation and progress. Any competition between browsers would be solely on speed, security and stability. Those are all great goals, of course, but it’s also nice that browsers are looking for ways to push the envelope.

What’s important is that we go back every once in a while, see what’s worked, and standardize it before moving forward again. And that’s what Microsoft has done with IE8.