I am sure you all know about Mictosoft’s IE9 Testdrive. Its main target was, for now, the developer – in an attempt to showcase the improvements in IE9 and maybe make us be more nice to them and forget how much time we waste with IE6.

What I was interested as a frontend developer was the the compatibility tables for features like SVG, CSS3 and DOM. And the test results, as per Microsoft’s page, are all gorgeous.

A more detailed list of supported features can be seen by checking their website but long story short, everything is green for them and not so green for the other browsers, except CSS3 :nth-child selector and CSS comments

and DOM level 2 style @import inside of @media

Another very interesting source of information regarding the present and future features supported by the browsers is When can I use… that also includes HTML5 elements – I notice IE9 testdrive page is not mentioning anything about HTML5 altough IE9 is expecting to support it in a certain percentage. They have also calculated the support that past and future browsers have for some features and their numbers are like this:

But you’d better check their website to see the features they worked with cause there are some differences that worth being taking into account.

We salute Microsofts initiative, altough we would love to see some of these CSS3 borders, backgrounds and selectors embedded in an IE8 update…cause we all check our statistics….