The rhetoric heated up in the web browser war this week, this time between Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Mozilla. Clearly infuriated by self-serving statistics released by Microsoft purporting IE9's near perfect HTML5 compliance compared to the 'stable' release of other browsers, Mozilla's Paul Rouget penned a detailed blog rebuttal that calls Microsoft out for being misleading. 

"The tests Microsoft are referring to are the ones they created during the development of IE9," writes Rouget as he attempted to sum up the heart of the matter. As such, "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." Rouget also fired a salvo back at Microsoft when he presented tests figures from third-party sites caniuse.com and html5test.com in which IE9 was shown as lagging badly compared to Firefox4.

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica presented a more balanced view in a long article which underscored the challenges and many nuances of accurately comparing web browser compliance. Paul praised Microsoft for the many improvements that were made to IE9, while noting that it still has some way to go. Ultimately, it is clear to me that the word "modern" is probably not an entirely accurate depiction of what is at stake here, and should perhaps not have been used in the provocative blog title.

For more on this story:
- check out this blog at Mozilla
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at Network World

Related Articles:
Google offers $20k for Chrome hack in Pwn2Own 
Chrome approaches 10 percent of the browser market 
Researchers demonstrate bypass of IE Protected Mode 
Google ships Chrome 8 browser; usage jumps 9 percent in November