Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's senior director of Internet Explorer, is remarkably chirpy for a man whose product's market share has plunged from 90% to roughly 60%, but it seems things are not all bad.
"The future for IE is as bright as it's been any time over the past five years," he says. "IE8 is the fastest-growing browser in history: it's the number one browser on Windows, and the number one across all OSs. The simple truth comes down to: every single day, more users are choosing Internet Explorer 8 than any other modern browser out there."
Gavin is also showing a platform preview of next year's IE9 – which, at least on his chosen demos, trounces Google Chrome for speed by making use of the PC's graphics processor.
What's more, he's just as keen to see the back of the nine-year-old IE6 as anybody else. "IE6 was built for a very different web at a very different time," says Gavin. "A modern web does require a modern browser. My aim is to get IE6's market share to zero as fast as humanly possible. That's good for the web, good for developers, and good for us."
IE6 is still around because companies standardised on it, and because it ships with Windows XP, which is still the most widely-used (and, arguably, most popular) operating system. The problem will shrink as Windows 7 takes off. However, IE9 won't run on XP: wouldn't it help kill IE6 if it did?
"XP is a fantastic operating system, it was simply built for a different time. The security profile from nine years ago is not the security profile needed today," he says. IE9 has a strong focus on security – Gavin says it blocks far more malware than either Firefox or Google Chrome – but "you need security all the way through the operating system". That's obviously not XP….
Gavin says the IE9 preview has been downloaded more than 1m times since 15 March, and developers are excited about it because it makes new kinds of web experience possible: experiences that are much more like applications than websites. This is using HTML5 and hardware acceleration, of course.
"We're all in on HTML5," he says. "We've been co-chairing the HTML5 working group, and we're actually leading the HTML5 testing group. With CSS 2.1, we've submitted 7,000 test cases to the W3C. We're actively participating with other browser vendors to get consistency across browsers. The goal is 'same markup'."
Microsoft's Test Drive site shows that IE9 is implementing important HTML5 standards better than rival browsers, but it still lags on Acid3 test. Gavin says Microsoft is implementing the features most commonly used by popular websites, rather than targeting Acid3. "We're using real-world customer data to inform our vision [for IE9], but as we focus on standards and markup, as a by-product, our Acid3 scores go up."
Gavin says Microsoft is taking a similar line with browser performance, testing against thousands of real-world sites rather than optimising for benchmark tests. "There are dozens of subsystems that make up the real-world performance of a browser – which is not just speed – and JavaScript can be as little as 5%," he says. "Rendering matters a ton. Layout matters a ton. It varies site by site. Looking at one specific test is a very narrow view of the web."
But, I suggest, Microsoft could save itself the effort if it just used the open source WebKit rendering engine – as used by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and most mobile browsers – instead of developing its own.
"Trident is actually a much bigger engine with many more components than WebKit," he says, "and I'm not even sure what WebKit is. There are a lot of different versions that get different results on the same tests."
Of course, another factor is that Microsoft has to maintain compatibility with earlier versions of its browser that are still used by many corporate customers and government departments. I ask Gavin if Microsoft's focus on HTML5 means that ActiveX is on the way out.
"ActiveX continues to be a choice," he says, "along with HTML5 and various plug-ins. Choice is a good thing! Developers will continue to choose the right tools for the job.
"There's more choice in the browser space than ever in history. Choice is great for customers, it's great for developers, and it's great for Microsoft. I think we do some of our most innovative work in a healthy competitive environment, serving customers and partners."
Those are fine sentiments – so we can only hope that IE9 actually delivers on them.
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