Before Internet Explorer 9 and recently released Firefox 4, HTML5 support was fairly limited to webkit based browsers such as Apple Safari and Google Chrome, both having a minority share in the browser market. Soon after, another minority browser, Opera joined the party and started supporting HTML5 standards.
With the launch of Internet Explorer 9 at SXSW and Firefox 4 couple of days back, the browser market heavyweights, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox have come out of Beta phase and full versions of both the browsers are available for anyone to download.
Internet Explorer 9 is far, far better than its predecessor browsers but stands pale when compared to performance of the Chrome browser. With Firefox 4, Mozilla has certainly bumped up browsing speeds to a new high and the browser feels far snappier than it ever was but again, Google is progressing way too fast than both Microsoft and Mozilla in all departments.
Chrome 11 is all set for release and HTML5, the main agenda of all the companies while promoting their latest browsers to end users is best experienced in Chrome browser. Second comes Firefox 4 and then IE9.
With the launch of the Chrome Web Store and thousands of free and paid add-ons to complement your browsing experience on Chrome, Chrome browser is inching towards becoming the hot-favorite choice for new age internet consumers.
But the best thing out of all this is that HTML5 is now fully supported by all major browsers, or at least latest versions of major web browsers.
Those who’re still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, are less likely to switch to HTML5 compatible web browsers as those chunks of users belong to an obsolete generation that doesn’t want to change its web tools, mainly due to the fear of change but IE6 usage is on a constant decline and should hopefully become insignificant in a couple of years from now.