Major Browser Makers Agree: HTML 5 is the Future

With Microsoft touting its new Internet Explorer 9 browser, and Mozilla putting the final touches on its new Firefox 4 offering, the two companies have let the fur fly with comments in recent days. The two companies have fired salvos at each other based on performance claims, supported web standards, and more. But on one point, they seem to violently agree: HTML 5 is the future.

Ryan Gavin, senior director of Internet Explorer, tells Fast Company:

"You can play buzzword bingo with HTML5 all day long. Simply put, HTML5 is part of the secret sauce that is going to unlock and move forward a new set of web experiences...We want the same markup that you write for IE to work across Firefox, across Chrome, across Safari."

There is no doubt that that last point makes sense. Everyone benefits from a common standard.  Meanwhile, Mozilla has been showcasing what Firefox 4 can do with HTML 5 on its Web o' Wonder site, and the company has been quite vocal about the promise of HTML 5. 

In the end, though, Microsoft's new browser and Mozilla's new one will battle on a number of fronts that have little to do with HTML 5. For one thing, Firefox remains a much more extensible browser than Internet Explorer (as does Google Chrome), and it has been proven that extensions matter to users. Firefox 4 is still slated for arrival on March 22, which means that this month we'll start to see how users vote when it comes to these major new browsers.