John Allsopp on IE9 as the new Web benchmark

"You needed the latest version of Internet Explorer to do this, and Netscape to do that, and as a developer it was incredibly frustrating," says Allsopp. "We got to this point in the mid to late 1990′s where it was an absolute disaster from a developer perspective." The developer asks his audience to imagine what it was like trying to explain to their mother "why you had to get a particular browser to get to a particular site".

In this context, Allsopp believed the release of Internet Explorer 6 in 2001 was a "milestone" event, coming as it did with rich CSS and Javascript support, as then as integration with Windows. "It was the first modern browser that your Mum and Dad used," he says, "and that your IT people would to tell the truth let you install on your computer."