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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Right now for my work, IE11 is the new IE. It has spectacularly bad performance issues in its nooks and crannies that slow our web application down by a factor of something like 1000 (it's hard to tell -- but after two days of hacking away inexplicable hotspots, it's running 10x faster and still glacially slow). (Switching to IE10 compatibility mode makes the performance problems disappear.)

Make no mistake, I think IE11 is a huge step in the right direction in terms of standards compliance, but right now it's not really usable.

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I suppose that's why IE has been discontinued and Microsoft developed "Edge".

I'd be interested to hear about these hot spots though (if you've blogged about them anywhere?). I've generally been quite pleased with Microsoft's browser effort in the past couple of years. Safari is quickly travelling toward becoming the next IE9 with the kind of weird bugs I've come across recently.

IE11 is "Edge".

No, they're actually different browsers, though both came with windows 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge

Microsoft calls the rendering engine in IE11 "Edge" as well, as can be seen in the developer tools:

http://i.imgur.com/Y7SKKja.png

I don't think "Edge Mode" rendering in IE11 has any relationship to the browser also named Edge. "Edge Mode" was around at least as far back as IE8. It's not the proper name of the engine.

Edge there means that the either HTTP header or META (don't remember which one exactly) won't specify IE version number and instead will use whatever is the latest version of the browser is. In IE10 this will mean IE10's engine, in IE11 this will be IE11's. This convention is several years old and predates Edge the browser.

Edge is IE12. They forked the Trident engine to remove all the legacy stuff. Otherwise, everything else is the same and gets the same new stuff that IE12 would have. No different.

Oh -- I stand corrected. Teaches me to ignore Microsoft for years... (I must say it's confusing the way IE11's settings are worded.)

That makes IE11 even worse since it hasn't abandoned compatibility and still performs incredibly badly. Maybe Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging it to move people towards "Edge".

The problem is that you have all your corporate customers who still insist on using webapps written with ActiveX and webpages that are still accessed by IE6 users. They would be more than a little upset if Microsoft told them "we're not supporting you anymore".

Microsoft is stuck here: they want to move on to modern web standards, but they can't afford to piss off their corporate customers.

Their solution is to split the web browser, shipping Edge for the consumer market (and the modern members of the business market) that wants to interact with the modern web, but still continuing to provide IE11 along with the OS to keep their corporate dinosaur customers happy.

No, IE11 is available for Win7 and Win8.

Edge (the version number is 20) is available only for Win10.

Edge runs a modified version of the trident engine, which is pretty peppy and drops all the legacy ActiveX stuff. It is absolutely not IE11. It also seems more secure. The recent IE 0-day patch last night doesn't apply to Edge, for example.

I have no idea if it will be successful, but kudos to MS on finally getting off the IE trainwreck. Now if only they'd release it for 7 and 8.

I've not blogged about the issues (I don't understand them well enough yet). Anything to do with calculating and manipulating the dimensions of elements (e.g. divs with fixed sizes) seems to be awful. (I'm getting something like 0.1s per call to jQuery's .offset() and .outerWidth() methods.) And switching to IE10 mode these problems disappear like magic.

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