At the recent Web Directions conference we had a stand made of White Boards and invited attendees to share their comments, feedback and questions. Of course we wanted to respond to those questions – so here’s our feedback!
Q. Give us XP support please! (Many people asked this, including whether we can upgrade XP to support IE9 features)
A. Sorry, we had lots of people asking for IE9 compatibility with XP as lots of people are still stuck with it, but it’s still a ‘no’. One of the reasons is a pretty straight forward technical challenge – which is that IE9 uses DirectWrite & Direct2D in DirectX 11, which is available in Windows 7 & Windows Vista.
Q. Give us <canvas> support please!
A. As if by magic, this is done! Yes, it’s in the IE9 Platform Preview 3
Q. ES5 in IE9 please!
A. Done, it’s in the IE9 Platform Preview 3
Q. Will Silverlight tools be able to export SVG and HTML, as they’re actually very compatible?
A. On 7th June we released Expression Studio 4 and the Silverlight tools work with XAML… so no SVG in there yet.
Q. Does IE9 support all the modules related to CSS3?
A. The CSS working group has categorized areas from low to high priority & the specifications are at different stages from working draft through to recommendation, so ‘all’ is very difficult to say – at some point we need to ship 
. Here are the modules that are supported in IE9 right now (see them in the release notes)…
- Media Queries
- Borders and Backgrounds
- Selectors
- Fonts
- Namespaces
- Color (rgba, opacity)
- Values and Units
- Opacity
Q. Can we do what the Mac does and take a website and make it an application? Then we could do that with IE6…
A. This is something we’re looking at – will keep you updated!
Q. Can we have more improvements in the developer tools in IE – there are still some things I prefer in firebug?
A. The ‘F12’ developer tools have improved further from IE8 to IE9 and include the following features:
- Network inspection
- JavaScript profiling
- UA String Picker
- Console Tab
- SVG Support
Please try it out and give us your feedback!
Q. Let <video> play anything WMP can – and WEBM!
A. <video> (and <audio>) are supported in IE9 Platform Preview 3 and we’ll play H.264 – and if it’s installed we’ll use WebM VP8 too. Here’s our public statement.
Thanks to everyone for raising these questions – please keep them coming!
