News is going around recently about all of the changes in IE11 from how they used to handle things.
Basically, the IE-specific techniques are being thrown out in favour of modern standards, and existing attempts to detect the IE browser (such as with document.all) will no longer work.
Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”
I for one welcome these changes, but what do you think?
Interesting article. I think the way MS are choosing to do things with IE11 is probably the most sensible option - it shouldn’t break any existing code, especially as they’re also changing to a different user agent string. Is it just my impression, or is the time between releases also getting shorter?
IE7 - Oct 2006
IE8 - Mar 2009
IE9 - Sept 2010
IE10 - Sept 2012
IE11 - TBA
That’s 29 weeks, 18 weeks, 24 weeks between them, so it definitely does seem to be faster for IE11
Bear in mind though that IE10 had an initial preview 5 months before it was released, so I wouldn’t expect IE11 before several more months have passed.
Another point that the article highlighted, which bears repeating:
[When implementing feature detection] it’s recommended that you always test for the standards-based version first.
All in all an interesting read.
It’s also nice to hear that IE11 will support WebGL. This seems to be a bit of a U-turn.
New browser versions usually only break browser sensing - which is broken anyway.
As long as scripts use feature sensing the new browser will only break the code where the browser claims to support something but doesn’t.