The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first tests to ascertain browsers’ conformity to HTML5.
And in a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0, the tests found that the most compliant browser currently available is IE9.
The tests cover seven aspects of HTML5 specifications: “attributes”, “audio”, “video”, “canvas”, “getElementsByClassName”, “foreigncontent,” and “xhtml5.” Other aspects, including web workers and the file API were not tested in this round.
The numbers show that IE9 doesn’t score perfectly in these areas. But all told, it gives a better showing than Chrome, trouncing the latter in the “xhtml5” spec.
Being at the forefront of comformance with the not-yet-official HTML5 standards challenges the IE9’s reputation as the bane of web development. As The Register notes, “we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft’s browser philosophy has changed in recent months.” Whether the new philosophy and better compliance in these tests will help IE9 win back developers remains to be seen.
