Microsoft Windows chief decries standards grandstanding

Steven Sinofsky took a veiled shot at Mozilla for claiming Firefox is HTML 5-compliant before the standard is complete

Microsoft will be compliant with industry standards in Internet Explorer 9 such as HTML 5, but Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, decried the habit of vendors getting ahead of the process.

"We are not trying to market things that are not there for developers to use yet," said Sinofsky during an interview with Network World. "Whether they are in IE or not, saying you are standards-based but then saying you are the most HTML 5-compliant browser does not make sense because the standard is not [complete] yet. There is a little bit of a time warp going on."

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Sinofsky was making reference to Mozilla who is pushing heavily on HTML 5 in development of its Firefox browser. The browser issue is a hot topic given that Microsoft has lost over the past year about 7 percent market share, according the thecounter.com, as users gave up on IE7 to go to alternatives such as Firefox and Safari. Microsoft is hoping IE8 can attack that trend and have IE9 squash it.

Sinofsky characterized his stand as responsible engineering. "We understand people's desire for interoperability, so HTML 5 is a thing that people talk about a lot but it is not even at the standard recommendation phase yet." Microsoft supports some aspects of the standard that are complete now such as storage and cross-site navigation.

Microsoft, however, is working toward full support on the HTML 5 specification, which was one of three advancements Sinofsky highlighted when he talked about IE9 during his Wednesday keynote address.

The other two were improvements on the Acid 3 test of standards compatibility, where Microsoft now scores 32 out of 100 with its latest prototype browser, and GPU-based rendering, which takes advantage of hardware for tasks such as animation or rendering type.

"These three things will be in IE9," he said. But he would not provide any delivery dates for the software.

In terms of Acid 3, a test from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a browser follows certain parts of Web standards, Sinofsky admitted there is work to do and said that Microsoft is doing it. "We are behind in it and I want to make sure people understand that we get it, we are working and we are showing progress," he said.

Sinofsky also acknowledged that the SunSpider Java benchmark shows IE performance lacking against the competition and said that disparity would be corrected. Microsoft released a set of videos it produced that highlight its standards work.

Sinofsky said the third important area for IE9 will be performance, especially as it relates to taking advantage of modern PC hardware.