Internet Explorer 9 Not A Modern Browser Says Mozilla Developer

Mozilla 'tech evangelist' Paul Rouget has claimed that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 web browser is 'not a modern browser' and that the browser is two years behind the times.

In a blog post blasting IE9, Rouget said that even though IE9 was a huge improvement over IE8, most of the features being offered by the web browser are 2-5 years old.

As for the web standards tests brandished by the company in everyone's faces, Rouget said that they were designed specifically for IE9 so its natural that the browser would score high on them.

"The tests Microsoft are referring to are the ones they created during the development of IE9. It's not that surprising that they pass the very tests they used to design and develop the browser - we score pretty well against our own unit-tests as well," he said.

The tech evangelist also published an interesting infograph that attempts to bring Microsoft face to face with reality.

According to the infograph, while IE9 is touting support for Canvas, Video, Geolocation and SVG, Firefox came with Canvas and SVG 5 years ago, whilst Video and Geolocation were introduced two years ago.

Web programmer Niels Leenheer, having  tested the first Internet Explorer 9 platform preview, agreed with Rouget's assessment, "I almost get the feeling they use the word HTML5 more like a fancy buzzword than actually supporting the specification."