The main benefit of open Web Standards is that it allows for a stable and secure platform for any developer to target just about any platform. Still, due to the laws of No Pain: No Gain, those developers need to consider how their application responds on just about every platform. Internet Explorer was once the outlier, and now they are one of the most prominent evangelists. It has been barely two months since we reported on the launch of modern.IE for Microsoft to integrate existing solutions into their product.

Enter Sauce Labs. The San Francisco-based company made a name for themselves by providing testing environments for developers on a spread of browsers across Android, iOS, Linux, MacOSX, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows XP. The company, along with competitor BrowserStack, got recent recognition from Adobe when the software company shut down their own also-competing product.

When we first covered modern.IE back in February (again, here), the initiative from Microsoft was created to help test web apps across multiple versions of Internet Explorer and check for typical incompatibilities. With the addition of Sauce Labs, Microsoft hopes to provide better testing infrastructure as well as automatic recommendations for common issues encountered when trying to develop for both "modern" and legacy versions of their web browser.

In my position, this perfectly highlights the problems with believing you are better than open architectures. At some point, your platform will no longer be able to compete on inertia. Society really does not want to rely on a single entity for anything. It is almost a guarantee that a standard, agreed-upon by several industry members, will end up succeeding in the end. Had Microsoft initially supported the W3C, they would not have experienced even a fraction of the troubles they currently face. They struggle in their attempts to comply with standards and, more importantly, push developers to optimize for their implementation.

There are very good reasons to explain why we do not use AOL keywords anymore. Hopefully the collective Microsoft keeps this grief in mind, particularly the Xbox and Windows RT teams and their divisions.

After the break: the press release.

Sauce Labs Teams with Internet Explorer to Create Automated Testing Tools for Developers on modern.IE 

Sauce Labs’ browser automation powers modern.IE’s Compatibility Inspector tool in the cloud

SAN FRANCISCO – April 2, 2013Sauce Labs Inc, the leading provider of cloud-based web and mobile application testing solutions for software developers and designers, today announced they are providing automated testing for Internet Explorer’s modern.IE update. The service adds Sauce Labs' cross-browser testing cloud to bring dynamic code-scanning to modern.IE, a newly launched scanner for common coding problems that often result from building for modern browsers like Internet Explorer 10 and 9 while supporting older versions of Internet Explorer.

“We’re thrilled to be teaming up with Internet Explorer’s modern.IE to accomplish our mutual goals of helping developers deliver terrific code and better performing applications,” said Steve Hazel, vice president of product at Sauce Labs. “With the addition of Sauce Labs to the compatibility testing toolkit for modern.IE, developers can easily get more thorough reports and recommendations on how to improve their site's Internet Explorer compatibility and performance.”

“Today users have more choices than ever as they browse the web. Supporting a user’s choice of browser, platform, and device is becoming increasingly challenging for developers as they build for the web. With modern.IE and the browser automation of Sauce Labs, we are helping developers save time when testing so they can spend more time innovating,” said Justin Garrett, senior product development manager, Internet Explorer.

Sauce Labs offers a cloud of over 100 browser and operating system versions – including mobile platforms – for automated and manual testing of web apps. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) application is used by some of the largest consumer and enterprise brands today. The Sauce testing cloud is already used to run over five million tests each month, with that number continuing to grow. Sauce also provides a unique, cloud-based, automated testing platform for both native iOS apps and mobile web hybrid apps, and a mobile test cloud for web browsers on the Mac OS X, iOS and Android environments.

For information on modern.IE, please visit http://modern.IE