Today Microsoft announced most of the features in the mobile edition of Internet Explorer 9 that was built for the Windows Phone smartphone line.
As TNW has reported in the past, IE9 Mobile is a rather interesting browser as it is harmonious with its bigger brother, Internet Explorer 9 for PC. By that we mean that IE9 Mobile shares much of the same code of its sibling.
Microsoft stated that the idea for this was to save developers time, by not forcing them to develop for two separate browsers, but one that worked on multiple platforms. This means that standards compliance is a real thing on Windows Phone. This makes browsing on the handsets much less frustrating than it was on their ancestors (Windows Phone 6.5, etc).
The following list is what Microsoft shared today, all of which are part of the Mango update:
- HTML5
- Audio
- Canvas
- DOM Storage (Web Storage)
- Geolocation
- Selection APIs
- Semantic Elements
- Video
- CSS
- CSS 2.1 compliance
- CSS3 2D Transforms
- CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders
- CSS3 Color
- CSS3 Media Queries
- CSS3 Namespaces
- CSS3 Values and Units
- CSS3 Selectors
- DOM
- DOM Core (L2 and L3) and Views (L2)
- DOM Element Traversal
- DOM L2 and L3 Events
- DOM L2 HTML
- DOM L2 Style
- DOM L2 Traversal and Range
- Enhanced DOM
- Mutable DOM Prototypes
- Selectors API
- ECMAScript 5
- SVG 1.1 (Second Edition)
- Most document structure, interactivity and styling
- Basic shapes
- Filling, stroking, marker, color
- Patterns
- Paths
- Text
- XHTML5
- Miscellaneous
- Cross-domain request (XDR)
- Data URI support
- Native JSON support
- SVG in HTML
Whether or not the fact that browsing is not too much of a chore on Windows Phone will discourage content providers online from building WP7 apps remains to be seen. The Mango update itself is about to be released to current owners of Windows Phone handsets. New devices are already being sold that run the software.
Microsoft, now that it has said its piece on Windows 8, appears to be restarting the Windows Phone news engine. Get ready for more as the Mango due date approaches.
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