IE9 Launch Sparks Controversy
Wednesday, 16 February 2011 by Ian Ebden
Looks like this article is over a year old, so some of the technical solutions or opinions may be a bit outdated now.
Mozilla (makers of Firefox) certainly feel that way, as outlined in their recent item “Is IE9 a modern browser?”. Microsoft quickly countered with a reply, but the conversation amongst developers keeps coming back to IE9’s lack of support for basic things like CSS3 Text Shadow, Transitions and Gradients. These are nice tools for designers that have been well supported by other browsers for some time now, and it seems odd Microsoft should leave these out.
There’s no doubt that IE9 is a huge improvement on previous versions, so congrats to Microsoft. But it’s really just where IE should have been a few years ago. Microsoft have upped their game recently, doing some great work on their OS and Windows Phone, and were probably hoping for similar plaudits for IE9 this past week. Overall though it seems the development community’s reaction to IE9’s arrival is “Welcome to the party. You’re late… and you left your pants at home”.
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