Programmer Musings

SVG Lives: the Internet Explorer Claim

This is the next in a series of posts refuting some recurring claims about the death of SVG, In the first post, I gave a brief overview of SVG. Each subsequent post takes a claim and refutes it.

The Claim

SVG is dead because it is not supported by Internet Explorer

This argument is possibly the most complicated. For a long time, almost the only way to view SVG in a browser was by using the ASV plugin that worked best under IE. Adobe has not improved this plugin in years and Microsoft has done nothing to make it easier to use. Meanwhile, the other major browsers (Firefox, Opera, and Safari, to name a few) have steadily been improving their native support for SVG.

At present, IE seems to be the only browser without any native support for SVG. Despite the fact that IE is the dominant browser, it's popularity has been falling in recent years (down to around 80% from the upper 90% range a few years ago). For some sites, the proportion of IE visitors is even lower.

Several companies and individual groups have been revisiting the idea of developing a new SVG plugin for IE. When one of these projects completes, users of IE would have the same access to SVG as users of other browsers.

That isn't the whole story though. SVG has actually spread in places other than the web. SVG has been growing in popularity among cell phone systems, especially outside the United States. SVG is very popular in the cartography community. Some companies are using SVG behind the scenes, because it is relatively easy to manipulate from code, and then rasterizing the results.

Once upon a time, lack of support in IE would have meant the death of almost any web format. Now, IE is not the only game on the web. More importantly, the market for SVG as a vector format has spread beyond the web to phones, maps, and even operating systems (the KDE window manager on Linux makes extensive use of SVG.)

Next time: Summary