Today’s announcement that IE9 will come to Windows Phone reflects our commitment to deliver the best experience of the Web on Windows. IE9 on the desktop provides consumers and developers with great HTML5 support that takes full advantage of the hardware for great performance. IE9 on Windows Phones will as well.
We’ve worked closely across the Windows Phone and IE teams over the last few months to deliver the same IE9 browsing engine—the same code, the same standards support, the same hardware acceleration, the same security and privacy protections—for Windows Phone as we’ve delivered on the desktop.
As a result, when you compare different browsers side by side using official W3C standards tests, for example here, you can expect very similar results for IE9 on Windows Phone and the Windows desktop. When you compare side by side browser performance, for example here or here, or running the FishIE Tank demo, you can still expect very similar results. You can also expect similar results comparing the security and privacy protections, for example here and here.
Our approach to sharing code involves using the same engine and the same highly-rated SmartScreen services. Using different engines—even subtly different engines—results in making developers do a lot more work and re-work to accommodate the differences. Articles like The WebKit Lie and the Future of Web Standards and iPad is the new IE6 reflect the problems in fragmented nightly builds and forks.
Today’s announcement is good news for developers and consumers. Quality, hardware-accelerated HTML5 on mobile devices will make the mobile Web significantly better. Developers will be able to use the same markup to deliver great interoperable HTML5 experiences on mobile—a for example H.264 video on Windows, iOS, and Android devices, and great CSS3, SVG, Canvas, ECMAScript 5, and WOFF support. Consumers will be able to enjoy these great experiences with great hardware-accelerated performance as well as security and privacy, using Tracking Protection on their Windows Phones.
—Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer
P.S. The demo at Mobile World Congress this morning showed different mobile browsers visiting a site much like the IE Test Drive site. The changes to the test drive site for the demo involved making it more mobile friendly, for example, accommodating screen size and orientation and touch. The underlying demo code and patterns from the IE Test Drive, like FishIE, remain unchanged.