HTML5: Where Does Your Browser Stand?

I recently heard about a new website that will show -- at a high level, at least -- what HTML5 features your browser supports, as well as a numerical "score" indicating some percentage of features implemented; with a total possible score of 160.

I should indicate right off the bat (Baseball pun intended. I'll be headed over to Citizens Bank Park to attend the Phillies home opener later this afternoon!) that this is entirely for fun, and not intended to show anything actually useful. This blog post is what happens when professional curiosity intersects with Excel obsession. Please don't read into it anything more than I present at face value.

My opinion on whether Flash is a good platform, or appropriate for mobile browsing, is entirely irrelevant (So let's not bring THAT argument over here, too, ok?). I am, by and large, a supporter of HTML5 and I pray that it lives up to its hype every night at my altar (computer) before I go to bed.

A majority of these numbers were collected from 3rd parties. I don't have all of these phones to test with, for example. I just asked friends who do to let me know how they scored. So in that regard, I can't be sure that the environment was pure or that they were running the absolute latest build, etc.

Disclaimers out of the way, let's talk numbers.

Here are some interesting conclusions I'm drawing from this data:

• The BlackBerry internal browser sucks, and Opera Mini is only marginally better. I can actually personally attest to this, having used a BB Pearl for about 6 months.
  
  
• I wholly expected to see IE7, and probably even IE8 toward the bottom of the rankings, but I was greatly surprised to see that IE9 shares the same score as IE8. (If I've done something wrong here, please tell me. All I did was download the latest IE9 preview and open the URL for the test.) Not that I could do any better, but a score of 19 is pretty pathetic compared to some of the other scores. I mean... this was almost beaten by Opera Mini on BlackBerry phones. Really.
  
  
• At the bottom of the middle of the pack, is Firefox 3.6.3, which received a score of 101 on both OSX and Windows 7. I expected Firefox to rank higher, (perhaps out of my own personal bias for it as a web developer who loves all of the wonderful features it affords me), but such is life.
  
  
• Safari on Windows only scored 70 points. Now, before we draw any conclusions from this, understand that there may be something wrong with the install on my machine here. When I tried to open the test, I was greeted with this lovely error message, twice:
  
  
  
  I expected better from the company that is pushing HTML5 so hard, but I suppose it's understandable since the Windows version of the browser is likely a second class citizen in Apple's eyes. So either Apple doesn't care about Windows (much), or there's something wrong with my setup that's preventing part of the test from running. Safari on OSX doesn't score much better, so even if my install isn't perfect, I doubt the Windows version of Safari would outpace the OSX version.
  
  
• That said, Safari on OSX is on pace with the iPhone 3G and 3GS. I'm not sure if that speaks well for Mobile Safari, or poorly of desktop Safari. Either way, it's a respectable score; the same way that getting a C on a test is "average". There's nothing wrong with being "average" is there?
  
  
• Somewhat to my surprise (though perhaps it shouldn't have been), the scores for the Motorola Droid, and Google's Nexus One mobile browsers (both using the default Android browser) match the current latest stable Chrome build, with a score of 118. There isn't that much of a spread between Mobile Safari and the Android browser. 5 points could easily be 1 or two features.
  
  
• And lastly, Chrome is leading the way with what appears to be the highest scores available. I would expect nothing less from Google, who is also pushing HTML5 pretty hard as the future of their cloud-based applications.

If nothing else, this affirms my current tendency of thought that when my AT&T contract is up (in September) that I'll be switching to an Android-based device on Verizon Wireless. At the moment, the front-runner appears to be the HTC Incredible, but 5 months is a LONG time for newer, better devices to make it to market. Who knows what's coming next?

Posted in HTML/CSS | HTML5 | 4 Responses April 12 2010