Internet Explorer 9: A Win Win?

Today at the Mix Conference Microsoft announced the latest updates about their browser. This sparked a flurry of posts around the web community. As my twitter steam started to crack, the shadows surrounding IE begin to shrink. Maybe, just maybe, IE9 will open up the amazing power of standards for more than a select few.

The Effects

To be honest it’s hard to say how IE9 will affect the current climate. IE9 has not erased the presence of IE6 from the drawing board. It’s just another nail in the coffin.

But IE is not the focus here: web standards are!

When we design for the web we are intrinsically designing for more than IE6, a desktop browser. We are designing for a huge number of devices and platforms with varying constraints and environments.

While IE9 is a huge step toward a more accessible web we cannot, and must not, let IE continue to blindside us or skew our perspective.

For too many years we have complained about how IE is evil. The fact is, its not!

Focus on the facts

We need to go back to were it all started. We need a course correction. We need to be realistic about what is possible right now and focus our energy on the future, specifically HTML5. We need to make it our objective to cultivate better constraints with clients. We need to educate them about what is possible now, the new and exciting stuff.

Moving on

Innovation requires exploration, and exploration requires just a bit of devastation.

Consider IE, with it we now have AJAX and better support for CSS, yes IE6 was cutting edge at one time. Even, Netscape was involved in the early days and gave us JavaScript.

Those were hard times, but without the browser wars who knows what would have happened.

It’s time to remember how we got here and put aside our bias. IE is not the enemy, it never has been. It has helped cultivate some of the best features on the web today. However, this would have never occurred without organizations like the W3C and the activists of the time.

So then, what do you think? What is our responsibility, our role in all this? How can we encourage change? How can we support standards and still innovation? What are the boundaries and who makes them, if there are any at all?