Shortly after releasing its surprisingly uplifting “Child of the 90s” campaign, Microsoft is back yet again to preach its progress with Internet Explorer.
This time, the company is speaking directly to developers with the launch of Modern.IE: a collection of free tools aimed at helping Web developers spend “more time innovating, and less time testing.”
At the heart of Modern.IE lie three tools: a ‘wizard‘ that scans sites for problematic coding practices, three months of free virtual testing via browser testing partner BrowserStack, and an editorialized selection of best practices. In addition, the company has also gathered together local virtualization tools and built BrowserStack add-ons for both Chrome and Firefox users.
According to IE senior director Ryan Gavin, this partnership with BrowserStack “is more of an opening note” than a final deal, which hints at the possibility of a longer term free offering of the typically $20/month+ service.
It’s noteworthy that Modern.IE’s scanning tool, on the other hand, is rather vague in the results it displays, in part for security purposes. However, devs can contact Microsoft for more details, as the company explains:
For security and privacy reasons, we don’t disclose these technical details on the site. Instead, developers can easily contact us, receive this info, and get IE engineering team support at no cost.
The service focuses on Internet Explorer, but also touches on other modern Web browsers. But when it comes to aging browsers, Gavin tells us Microsoft’s focus on IE was intentional. Web developers can learn more about Microsoft’s Modern.IE site via the link below.
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