Fourth Planet Development
The Official Site of Kevin Marsteller

I wanted to make a post this morning about IE9, whose beta was released by Microsoft on Thursday. I wanted to see if they truly deserved the rather soft coverage BBC gave them (you'll notice they don't interview any objective techies).  One of the more intriguing aspects that they advertise is the fact that the browser is capable of utilizing 100% of your computer's processing power. I was planning on viewing a variety of pages of IE9 with a rather loaded version of Firefox (I have somewhere around 13 add ons installed).

I go to their website to download their beta, and when I open the installer, I get the following message:

Service Pack is not supported

Setup doesn't support the Windows service pack version currently installed on your computer.

I run Windows Vista, fully up to date.  How does this happen?

In other news, it seems Apple's Safari doesn't have much in terms of cross-OS support.  I am currently developing a website which relies on HTML5s video tag.  Being that Apple and IE are the only two major browsers to not support the Theora video codec, I went to download their latest versions to test some simple javascripts, and make sure they could play the backup (H.264) videos.  You already know what happened with IE9, Safari wasn't much better.  While I was able to install the browser just fine, upon loading the website it wasn't the backup video which played; rather, it was the message I put in place for users of old browsers (which don't support HTML5).  At first I figured my browser detection javascript wasn't working for some reason, but in actuality Safari just didn't display the video.

I then went to browsershots.org - something every web developer should have in their favorites - and sure enough, Safari displayed the video just fine on an Apple computer, but not on a PC or linux.

Apple.  Microsoft.  I want you to make good software - I really do.  By improving your technology it forces others to improve upon theirs, without competition development tends to slow down to a minimum.  However, screw-ups like these force your users to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, eventually forcing you completely out of the picture, meaning less competition, and less development.  For the sake of the web, please get your act together.