Internet Explorer 10 is “native” and good for webapp developers

[2011-04-13]

The Internet Explorer 10 Preview (IE10) comes with many new features, two of them are especially good news for webapp developers:

ECMAScript 5 strict mode: enables a more modern dialect of JavaScript [2].
CSS3 Grid Layout: is great for laying out graphical user interfaces [3].

Oddly, Microsoft sells IE10 as “native”:

The only native experience of the Web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.

It then clarifies what it means:

IE9’s approach to taking advantage of what the operating system offers – from the native graphics stack to jump lists in the shell – maximizes performance, usability, and reliability. We released a fast, clean, trusted, and interoperable IE9 globally for consumers and businesses four weeks ago with the goal of delivering the best experience of HTML5. The best HTML5 is native to the operating system, so Web sites have the fewest translation layers to pass through. The best HTML5 enables sites to use the same markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – across browsers. The best HTML5 respects developers’ time and enables same markup by treating site-ready HTML5 differently from unstable technologies.

Given how long it takes Microsoft to adhere to standards and given that other browsers have had many natively accelerated technologies for a while, this is a strange spin. And accordingly, it has already been mocked on the internet: