When asked about how similar IE9 for the desktop and IE9 for Windows Phone 7 are, I often say… it’s a direct port. Turns out I was wrong, there are infact 17 difference that you should probably bear in mind. 17 is a pretty small number but knowing these upfront will save you a ton of time if you end up having to debug your website on WP7.
First there are a handful of features that have been added:
- GPS support for HTML5 geolocation. Windows Phone uses the location stack on the device and uses GPS if it is available. The desktop uses various other methods which do not require GPS (since most machines do not have this feature)
- Support for Viewport. Width,height, user-scalable. Whilst the following features are available in some browsers, the minimum-scale, maximum-scale, and initial-scale properties are currently unsupported for Internet Explorer Mobile.
- Support for the CSS property –ms-text-size-adjust.
Now for the things that are unsupported (with the Biggie being at the top)
- Downloadable fonts such as EOT, TTF/OTF and WOFF fonts. Whilst the font-face tag is supported the mobile browser will not attempt to download these font. A list of all the supported fonts on WP7 can be found here.
- Backward compatibility for Internet Explorer 8 documents. Internet Explorer Mobile renders these documents in Internet Explorer 9 mode.
- Cross-window communications, such as the ability to target a window by using script
- Multi-stream HTML5 audio
- CMYK image support
- VBScript support
- ActiveX support
- Extensibility through browser helper objects, toolbars, and other related items
- Active document support
- Older web technology support, such as binary behaviors, HTCs, HTML+TIME, and VML
- Full support for complex script languages in all document modes
- Surrogate pair support
- JIT support for Jscript
- <input type=”file” /> will render but since the 7.5 update it no longer allows you to upload files in way it did before the the 7.5 update.
