⇥ IE9 will have rounded corners (and a bunch of other stuff)
And then, there was much jubilation.
Marvel of marvels, the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, which was previewed yesterday at PDC, will finally support rounded corners. I have, of course, no illusion about the fact that this isn’t related to my post from a couple of days ago, but it’s good to hear that they’re at last catching up.
Of course, this also means that there is yet another version of IE that we need to check and account for in our code, but, frankly, I don’t expect that to be a major problem where these things are concerned: if anything, the availability of features like rounded corners across all three major browsers for the first time in the history of the web will be enough to push many developers to simply ignore older versions of IE beyond the graceful degradation of their designs—much like many do today.
This, however, will have the potential to accelerate the adoption of the latest version among users who will want the best experience possible. It will also mean that new designs will be much more fluid and dynamic, since more and more changes can be made by simply altering the code, rather than by mucking around with graphical elements. It’s a good day for the Photoshop challenged among us!
IE9 is also getting several more interesting features, like better font rendering and control (something that other browsers have placed a lot of emphasis on lately), higher speed and much more.
Photo credit: Cornered by gfpeck
Comments
I will be very happy if they score 100/100 on Acid 3. A score of 32/100 is bad, but I think it is really too early to tell. I think we will get a better idea of how much emphasis they are putting on Acid 3 once it goes beta. Implementing standards like Acid 3 will buy them much more developer support than “Excel Web App”.
“enough to push many developers to simply ignore older versions of IE” Wishful thinking. Unfortunately, most designers/developers don’t actually decide to or to not support a browser. The populace does. We have to support whatever is being used, just to be in best practice…and to satisfy clients. IE6 hasn’t even dropped below 10% usage yet, with two existing versions above and more than eight years’ abuse (eternity, considering most of the sites we use daily didn’t exist then).
This is not to say the advent of IE9 having better CSS support is not exciting. It certainly is. It is only to say we shouldn’t have held our breath for all the promises of IE8 or IE7, though we did…and sadly it wasn’t as much of an improvement as we’d hoped, despite being in beta for a full year (about 4x what FF typically is) and being between versions for three years. By the time IE9 is in RC, even if it ushers in everything we hope for now, it will still be behind on whatever the current standards are.
@anthony: I think we are looking at the problem from two different perspectives. Obviously, designers have to make things work on as many browsers as reasonable—in some cases, including ancient versions of IE6 because of external constraints (such as the adoption cycle in a particular environment). However, “work” is not the same as “look good.”
The design of the CSS system makes graceful degradation possible—which means that designers have a path of least resistance towards providing the best UX with the tools that make doing so simplest. We are now at a point where Webkit-based browsers can provide a powerful UX with nothing more than a few line of (nearly-standard) CSS, so graceful degradation into IE becomes a powerful proposition for any developer—which means that interfaces will look less and less interesting in it unless the development team steps up and fixes things.
IE9 will be W3C compliant?
Where have we hears something like this before???
Oh Yes!
IE7
IE8
I’ll believe it when I see it, not one second before.