IE9 Preview: Large performance improvements and 95/100 on Acid3 | Hacker News Reader

IE9 Preview: Large performance improvements and 95/100 on Acid3

blogs.msdn.com

62 pointsindy52 comments

The part I've been waiting for years to hear was:

"We recommend sending IE9 the same standards-based markup your site sends other browsers. "

For how long? Can I count on IE9 keeping up with the new developments in HTML capacity, as we move closer to desktop functionality?

Of course not - so IE9 doesn't matter, since it will soon be obsolete.

Does it mean I don't have to use separate code for IE and Standards based browsers?

Yes.

The browser wars are back!

MS, please bring the strength of this engine to WP7!

It is my understanding that IE9 will come to WP7 - just not at launch.

Thanks. You just made my day!

Or more importantly, bring it to Outlook.

Please, please, please make email templates easy-to-write!

This would be huge as now Outlook uses the shitty Word html engine for some reason. Hopefully, the next version of Office will get this!

This is great news, except for the fact that there is still a huge percentage on IE6. Until people migrate off, it'll still be a pain in the ass to develop sites.

That's one nice thing about the other browsers. Most users are on very similar versions. IE, on the other hand, have users spread out across many old versions.

It will be time to celebrate when they can get most of their users on the newest IE. I can't wait for that day.

The real shame is no IE9 for Windows XP. [1]

Some 60% [2] of the market share is Windows XP. IE 6 - 8 are going to be with us for some time.

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/FrequentlyAskedQuesti...

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Microsoft_Win...

That is unfortunate. Hopefully the popularity of Win7 will help with this.

I wonder if MS is contemplating releasing a non-video accelerated version of IE9.

The best solution I see to the "no IE9 for windows xp" problem if were not counting on Microsoft to do something is Chrome frame; but I think some big player (youtube, facebook etc..) would have to almost force it on users for it to cut down on those big percentages

http://www.google.com/chromeframe

>The real shame is no IE9 for Windows XP

Yes, but there are plenty of other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome that work in XP. Unless you're talking about accessing sites that will work only in IE.

Huge? 17% is significant, but not huge.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...

People have several options: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and, IE8.

All of these are free, so I think we're almost to the point where people can be nudged off of IE6.

Too bad that with this platform preview they concentrated on adding new features and the whole browser is pretty unstable. I keep getting errors with third party libraries (jQuery 1.4) and controls. Sometimes the errors are pretty funny, e.g.:

SCRIPT5022: Exception thrown and not caught

Waiting for the beta....

That's probably the issue with the JS standard they discuss here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/07/16/how-ie9-platfo...

Until IE9 supports auto-updates down the wire, like Chrome, it is as bad as IE6. IE6 was a great browser when it came out. It took years to become the horrible monster we know it to be. If IE9 doesn't auto-update, all it can achieve is the same success as IE6.

It updates with Windows Update. So if you set your Windows updates to 'automatic', your browser will get automatically updates.

Note: this only applies to security updates. Windows Update divides updates into three categories: Critical, Recommended, and Optional. Critical and Recommended updates are installed automatically by default. Many enterprises choose to control Recommended updates manually at the group policy level; some even control critical updates with group policy. Major revisions of Internet Explorer have traditionally been delivered as optional updates.

Microsoft shipped both IE7 and IE8 as critical updates.

Not a chance.

Silently rolled out security updates? Maybe. But general purpose auto-updating behavior? Nope. Predicability is a key motivator for enterprises to use Microsoft software.

Convincing businesses to standardize on a particular IE version inside their organizations grants Microsoft a key sales differentiator: "If you use our competitors' software, you'll need to permanently retain an engineering staff to deal with an ever changing platform."

If you're an internet startup, Microsoft's position sounds insane, but consider the stance of tech-ignorant governments and corporations. Yeah, ideally, they should have engineering teams and utilize them to optimize their businesses. Realistically, they don't know how.

If you ask me: the standardizations bodies need to step in here. Let <!DOCTYPE HTML> be the wild west, but declare a deadline for all browsers to work on their HTML 5 implementations. When that deadline passes, all browsers would have a small window of time to release a version which handles <!DOCTYPE HTML5> as a stable, non-changing rendering engine. Then developers could opt into a stable platform, or the wild west. Enterprises could develop internal tools with a fixed doctype and browser venders could pledge support for those rendering engineers. Internet startups could stay on the bleeding edge and play the upkeep game.

I didn't say it was a realistic prospect. What I mean is that this is the biggest flaw of IE. 98% of IE6's crappiness is directly dependent on the fact that it doesn't auto-update. IE6 would never have been such a problem if MS had been able to auto-update it to IE7, 8, 9...

Until that fundamental philosophy flaw is fixed, the rest is just putting lipstick on a Sarah Palin. I won't get excited about IE9 passing ACID3 tests, because all it means is that for a while IE will be an ok browser, but within a year or two it will suck again. I much prefer permanent solutions.

Yay, IE9 supports rounded corners and drop shadow in CSS.

Things like that certainly makes it suck a lot less when adjusting css styles made for webkit to work on IE as well.

Fascinating what a multi-billion dollar software company

can finally do when they have some motivation from competition.

Now just allow it to run on the millions of Windows XP installs

who have modern hardware but don't need Vista/W7.

No. Don't keep XP alive, it's insecure and dangerous.

Proof, please.

It's pretty well known apps under XP don't need to ask users for permission to perform privileged actions, unlike Vista, Linux, or OS X.

Defaulting to running directly as admin is a settings flaw, not a problem with the underlying security system.

Yes, and poor defaults are a problem with the OS.

Unfortunately by the time we can count on this being available on a majority of client computers, the web will have moved on to newer and better things.

As long as Microsoft insists on allowing users to use anything but the latest version, we will have to play to the slowest mover - which will make everybody suffer.

Hm, is that actually true? Internet Explorer 7 seems to be fading fast. Internet Explorer 6 is in my eyes the only really big problem and there is not much Microsoft can do about it. (They should bring IE9 to XP but I don’t think that’s going to help all that much.)

Transitions seem to be fast now, Microsoft can push out updates relatively quickly.

Some data, from justin.tv:

IE8: 75.57%

IE7: 17.84%

IE6: 6.57%

All other versions of IE: 0.02%

Yeah this is good, but the thing to keep in mind is that an OS release always drives these numbers way up. IE8 comes with Windows 7. Vista didn't do so well so the IE7 numbers reflect that.

IE9 Won't benefit from being part of an OS release (unfortunately).

It's not just that... large corporations that are sticking with XP are finally getting around to upgrading from IE6 - and skipping directly to IE8.

Windows XP Pro price raised (on average) to around $150. Windows 7 Pro is (on average) $85. I know large corporations get killer deals, but over time the cost will outweigh the benefits. I think the phase out will be less than 5 years for most businesses.

IE 8 has been out for several years now, Had they done like Google did, IE 7 would have been gone in less than 24 hours.

A couple of years is fast if your calendar is still stuck on '95, but not anymore.

after all these years: 95/100. great work huh?

why don't they stop with IE already and start shipping a webkit-based browser? why would they want to always be a couple years behind everyone else on that front?

While I would be incredibly happy to hear that IE switched to webkit. 95/100 is a great ACID3 score. And they explained why a few of the points weren't made. ACID3 just tests things that browsers usually get wrong. Not necessarily things that are in that high demand to be used by Web Developers.

IE9 is an amazing step-up from IE8 so far and I think we should all be patting them on the back. I'm sure dealing with Microsoft policies and playing catchup to the other browsers is no easy task. And the team is doing a great job trying to modernize IE9.

> IE9 is an amazing step-up from IE8 so far and I think we should all be patting them on the back.

A boss once told me "you don't get rewarded for doing your job - you get paid." :)

My boss screamed at his phone today. I wondered if he realised he'd just set all the employees on edge and lost maybe 2+ person-hours of work for the rest of the day - traded for the momentary release of an angry outburst.

Similarly, your boss might have been technically correct, but a boss who would rather be right, make a point and potentially knock your morale, than boost your morale for free should really be rethinking his approach, IMO.

Sure, but you don't work for that guy anymore, do you?

Heh, no. And he was a major factor in my resignation. We were all pretty sure he fit the clinical definition of psychopath.

It's funny to see them making those remarks regarding Acid3 and having "tests" result on the same page showing how IE9 is has the best support for HTML5, CSS3. (Hint: it's best at passing MS tests, some of which are really obscure).

It really irks me when I hear comments like this. It seems as if MS can't win as far as some people are concerned.

I think this is a great article that demonstrates MS's commitment and enthusiasm to pushing their browser forward.

I'm excited about IE9. I think that MS could win even with the haters, if MS keeps up the good work for a few years. For them, a one-off IE9 might be impressive, but not enough to make up for the suffering of IE6.

Internet Explorer 8 came out in March 2009. IE7 in 2006. Microsoft are keeping it up.

95/100 is better than the current Firefox, so they're not exactly "a couple of years behind everyone else." Only WebKit and Opera have perfect ACID3 scores.

I don't see any support for SVG filters, and I was using them 3 years ago in Firefox.

Firefox's SVG implementation doesn't even support animation, and they've no roadmap for implementing it. Lame.

Yeah, using Firefox's SVG implementation was not a good example:

https://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

"Big areas of the SVG specification where we're still lacking include filters, svg defined fonts, and declarative animations. A page listing the current implementation status of svg elements and the rendering backends can be found at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html.

It mentioned somewhere else that the five failing tests are all SVG tests and probably won't become standards because they are redundant.

SVG Fonts is superseded by WOFF. SVG Animation is superseded by CSS Annimations.

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