But this just seems to be part of the overall growing trend towards sexy HTML5 user interfaces. Netflix is another one as described in their recent post.

The industry has been steadily shifting into the next phase of web development for a couple years – we’re nearly there now. Well since IE6 is no longer a concern (or hadn’t you heard – less than 5% of web users last month and still dropping), IE7 is quickly shuffling off the stage (~12% and steadily dropping), and IE9 is waiting in the wings.

Oh and IE8?

Yeah I don’t share in the pessimism of some who think that IE8 is the new IE6. And there are a lot of reasons I don’t:

• Month-by-month, the total marketshare of all IE versions combined has been steadily dropping. From 95% six years ago to about 50% now. Any gains on this percentage will be with IE9, not anything older.
• There are now more major modern browsers and platforms than ever before supported by companies with lots of cash and lots of push.
• Unlike IE6 at the time, IE8 simply does not have the capabilities expected of the average web developer. Given the numbers in my first point, next year there will be more users supporting SVG, Canvas, HTML5 audio/video than don’t. It makes mathematical sense to target modern browsers first.
• In a year and a half, Windows 7 went from nothing to a quarter of all desktops. At the end of next year, I predict XP users will be a minority among Microsoft desktops. Any Windows 7 users will be using IE9 in a year, not IE8.
• Google’s Chrome Frame plugin can be used to target IE8- users if you can convince them to download/install it. Disclaimer: I work for Google.

As for my own responsibility as a web developer… well, I’ve been developing for IE9+ for about 5 years now. I just didn’t know it at the time

I’m also pleased to see that they support conditional processing (the <switch> element) so you can see at a rough glance what feature strings they claim to support by accessing this page I made years ago. Not a bad feature set for first time out! Kudos to the IE team!

And they support <canvas> too!

In my brief look at IE9 while running through the SVG tests, I would say their biggest areas to improve on before final release are text (especially text selection) and DOM. Though Alexis assures me that they do pass quite a number of SVG torture tests.

Hey, now that we have all major browsers supporting basic SVG rendering, it’s really time to ramp up the effort on SVG Torture Tests to ensure DOM coverage and corner cases. We are looking for someone to lead this activity in the SVG Interest Group.

Oh, and I would love to have SVG-edit working in IE9.

I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it’s built on the fragile Windows stack. That’s not to say that other OS stacks aren’t fragile, but this is just tonight’s frustration.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Happy Meal with extra cheese. Sony Vaio laptop.

Download and run iepreview.msi.

The installer downloads and tries to install KB2120976, KB2028560, KB2028551 first.

In the process of doing this, it aborts and says:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2739.

The failure window in the installation wizard has an “Installation Help” button. This button does nothing.

Thanks for the help!

Do a little sniffing around the web and find this page which tells me to run regsvr32 from an elevated command-line prompt to register the JScript DLL.

I do that.

Installer gives me the same exact error.

Then I decide to look at each one of the KB security patches. Each one tells me that I have to “Install the Genuine Windows Validation Component”. No matter what browser I try this in, it never seems to take – I always end up clicking on “Genuine Windows Validation, Alternate Method”. This gives me an .exe that I run that gives me a code to punch into a web form that tells Microsoft that I have a non-pirated copy of their software so I should be eligible to download software that will fix their software.

Right.

In each one of these patches, I get a dialog box that says

The update is not applicable to your computer

So this must be why the installer is failing, I guess? Maybe I could dig into why this problem is occurring, and hack around it. Let me just look at the source of the installer… oh wait…

So is this a broken installer? I’m not the only person who’s had this problem so far… go to the IEBlog announcement and search for ’2739′.

P.S. I also love how the IEBlog redesign doesn’t let me link to individual comments anymore.

P.P.S. I am really trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, but c’mon…

I decided to go with my Solitaire demo because it was the most complete, didn’t infringe on any copyrights (looking at you Tetris), and most visually recognizable. It’s not the most innovative, but then again the point of this is not necessarily to win any prizes. It’s really about increasing awareness.

Unfortunately, the SVG (26kb) and JavaScript (16kb + 21kb) totaled 63kb. I did some cleanup of the SVG, minified the JS and then put the script inline with the SVG and then gzipped it. The result was a .svgz file that was 9kb. Perfect!

I then got an email from a friendly marketing/evangelism person at Microsoft who said that the engineers did not know how to open the svgz file to review the code to ensure it was under 10k. Woops! I explained to her that I thought it would be ok for the SVG to be gzipped, much as PNG/GIF files use compression and sent her the uncompressed SVG file for them to review. After all, SVG is just an image format, right?

Was I following the rules? Did Microsoft give me a fair shake? See for yourself. Who knows, maybe this is the first time a Microsoft admin had to figure out how to serve SVG on a Microsoft web server.

Out of curiosity, I later tried to see how far I was able to get down the Solitaire game: 5811 bytes. Not bad for a complete game that has scalable graphics. I’d be curios to see the equivalent SWF file.

I don’t expect you to vote for my entry, but what I do expect you to do is now go out and submit .SVGZ entries to the MIX 10k challenge. That one SVG entry is looking pretty lonely. If I can get Solitaire down to 5811 bytes, surely you can do better?

Thanks a lot to Amy, the evangelist/marketing person who really was quite patient with me.

• Opera’s “Web Opener” (and newest Interest Group member) makes a request
• Internet Explorer’s Head Honcho gets a little huffy
• Snarkiness

BTW, if you’re not on Twitter yet, you are missing out. For instance, I find this feed useful.

SVG Support Tables Now Interactive

Someone mashed together the data I publish with my SVG support tables and made it much more interactive and useful! Great! That’s what makes the web so cool: sharing. Now to see if I can break his scraping script… Joking!

IE9 Likely To Support SVG?!?

As “reported” in Wired and Ajaxian: Golly. How much? When? What version/profile? Sorry, but it seems that this is a misinterpretation of the standard SVG party line from Microsoft. Mumble, grumble, integrity… journalism… something, something, mumble…

More Mozilla SMIL Progress

Brian Birtles posts on the latest progress on Mozilla implementing SMIL-in-SVG. I’m hoping to see SMIL pick up, particularly as browser native support improves further. Of course you can get a headstart on this by using the FakeSmile shim right now in 4 of the 5 big browsers.

Qt Winning Votes?

Doug seems to agree with me that a LGPL for Qt could be a big game changer. I admit, I’ve always had a soft spot for Qt, but the recent news that it will be available to commercial projects without purchasing a license from Nokia is getting a lot of people excited – even heavy fans of Java

Google I/O Registration Open

I might actually try to attend the Google I/O conference this year in May. Rob and I tried to get our ducks in a row last year but the planning never crystallized. I’ve been doing some playing with Android recently, so there’s actually a reason for me to go this year.

For instance, the Apple key () is used for most key combinations (copy/paste/open/save/close) while the ctrl key is used in a similar way on Windows. Worse, the ctrl key is located further left on the keyboard than on typical keyboards, meaning my poor baby finger is being used more than it should be.

So what I’d like to do is figure out a way to swap the ctrl and Apple/Windows key while in Windows. I’ve done a preliminary scour of the web and turned up a keyboard remapping utility from Microsoft that sadly doesn’t touch the ‘special’ keys. I also turned up an ancient thread about twiddling with the registry, but I don’t want to do that unless I need to. Lazyweb?

Update: A few scant hours from posting this, I got a reply from Ian below that does exactly what I want. With SharpKeys for Windows, you can re-map your Left Windows key to the Left Ctrl key and get that synergy I was looking for. Now the Apple-C works as Copy on both OS X and Windows! Beautiful!

Note that there is a right Apple/Cmd key if you’re a big Windows key user (Windows+E brings up the Explorer, for instance).

My only fear with all this is that I will hobbled when I go to someone else’s Windows computer. Small price to pay for sanity on my own computer though.

But Microsoft has also publicly been “looking into” SVG for years and years, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

These days, Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at… as long as all my textual content is actually visible, then that’s just fine by me.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)

Only happened in the last few days too. Weird.

Continuing with the navel-gazing theme, some points I noted in my stats:

• Opera and Safari now amount to 7-10% of my total unique visits
• Since its release last month, Firefox 3 has about the same share as IE7, which was released over a year and a half ago (20% total)
• IE has lost roughly 5% of total share on my site since I’ve started recording these statistics (this is my third year)
• IE6 is still the browser version with the largest single share (roughly 30%). Give Firefox 3 a few more months though…
• Virtually no one is using IE8 Beta 1, released over four months ago. I mean, way more people are using Firefox 3.1 pre-Alpha-1! I see at most one or two hits a week from IE8. Which makes sense because you can’t install multiple copies of IE and there aren’t very many cool things you can do with IE anyway.