There was a lot of buzz yesterday about Microsoft demonstrating a preview of IE9 at the MIX conference in Las Vegas.

Before I even had a look at what they had to say, I already made up my mind about the following:

If this is yet another incremental improvement with partial web standards support, then it is no improvement at all. It will be yet another browser to take care of and that is the whole problem to begin with.

Having actually watched the keynote now, here are some additional thoughts:

• I am duly impressed by the commitment to properly support CSS 2.1, CSS 3, HTML 5 and SVG. If Microsoft can actually deliver on this promise and be more aggressive in their update strategy, we all win. We are then looking at an incredible new world of opportunities for web applications. It will still be a few years for the incompliant browsers to die, but we as a community can accelerate that.
• Showing a 52% ACID3 pass score is not a selling point, it is embarassing. Hopefully the end product will be at least as standards compliant as Safari, Chrome and Firefox. If not, then we have another half-ass browser to work with.
• Sites developed for IE8 are promised to work for IE9. Good, this takes away my initial worry.
• It is encouraging to learn that IE9 will be approaching or even beating the javascript benchmarks of competing browsers.
• I've enjoyed not hearing anything about useless propietary features like slices, accelerators and search providers. Microsoft seems to understand they need to fix the basics first.
• The hardware accelerated demos are impressive, but the marketing tone is completely inappropriate. Microsoft is in no position to market their browser as superior to other browsers. They are responsible for holding back web innovation for a decade and billions of dollars of lost productivity. They should try to catch up with other browsers and pray for a renewed respect from the web community. It is a time to be humble, to apologize and to deliver. Once actual standards compliancy is delivered and proven, blowing your own trumpet is fine.
• As for hardware accelerated browsing, I'd say why not? Same markup, faster rendering. However, unless every other platform is doing it, how are we supposed to exploit this? The answer is that we can't, since we control nor the browser nor the OS. 
• No news so far on Microsoft's upgrade strategy for IE. I hope IE9 will be available for Windows XP and newer but I fear the worst. I am also hoping IE will push much more updates, similar to Firefox.
• Microsoft seems to have stepped up their involvement in the W3C. That's a great selling point but it means nothing. Recently, one of the W3C members, Adobe, was reported to try to block the HTML5 draft for the canvas tag. Not sure if that story is true, but it goes to show that membership means nothing if you are in the group for self interests only.

Despite a strong skeptic tone (I've been dissapointed too often), I am overly positive about the announcements made so far. In fact, you can call me excited. Seeing is believing, but if these promises are actually realized, we're looking at a bright future for the web. It does leave you wondering where technologies like Flash and Silverligh will fit in...

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