While Internet Explorer 9’s HTML 5 support may be less than fully complete, at least it has begun on its journey of implementing some of the cool new features developers are beginning to expect of web browsers.
However, they have not gone all-in on support for many of the standards that are not quite yet finalised, for example Web Sockets. While support for these has been available in Google Chrome for some time, and Firefox and Opera for a little while too, there has yet to be mention of their inclusion in IE 9, until now.
Microsoft have announced the HTML 5 Labs, a site run by their interoperability team (who also do the Azure PHP libraries and Eclipse plugins for example) which provides some IE 9 add-ins that include support for the less-rounded HTML 5 specifications. Currently the prototypes include IndexedDB and WebSockets, but come with a hefty warning label:
“WARNING: These specifications are unstable and will change. Developer code and web pages based on these specifications will break and will have to be re-written. Use these prototypes only to experiment with new HTML5 features and not for production code.”
At least developers can expect to see support for these kinds of standards at least in some way available on the IE 9 platform – although it remains to be seen whether it will make it into an official release. More on the HTML 5 labs site, or the IE blog.
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