Chrome vs IE9 | Hacker News Reader

Chrome vs IE9

blog.gadodia.net

21 pointsniyazpk43 comments

I would have to agree with most of this post. I gave IE9 a full run yesterday, using it as my primary browser and honestly there is nothing huge that I miss from Chrome.

Although this may not get some people going back to IE, I think it will definitely stop people from changing in the first place.

Serious props to Microsoft and the IE team for this release.

Thanks, it's been a lot of hard work for a lot of people making all of this happen ... I am glad to see you're happy, but am most curious what else you think can be improved. How can I help you get to the 100% happiness point? Please feel free to drop a comment in here or email with any feedback you have. For technical bugs, the established process is to indeed go via Connect, so this would NOT replace the correct/official feedback process ... But I promise to read up every comment left as a response to this one and try to follow up on as many of them as are actionable. I am obviously under NDA so cannot always discuss the internals/specifics of what we are doing, nor am I officially a spokesperson for Microsoft, so please keep those in mind when reading my responses :-)

One annoying bug/feature i just noticed is that when you delete a folder from the favorites view it closes the favorites bar. When wanting to delete a few folders kind of annoying.

I will collate a small list of items if you like and shoot them through to your email. But again, great work.

Yes, would love the list! Thanks for your feedback and kind comments.

The value of what you're doing right here with your post shouldn't be overlooked. Just to know that you guys were around, listening and taking suggestions would have made a difference to my satisfaction with IE... were I still primarily a windows user. :)

Keep doing what you're doing, get more of the IE Team to do the same.

Thanks; I'm not sure about the "get more of the IE Team on" bit. Personally, I'd rather the bulk of the IE folks focus on making IE9 better than ask around for feedback. I realized that even through these channels, I'm overwhelmed (my day job isnt to collect feedback for IE - there's folks who do that for a living; I'm just a regular hacker like the rest of you here with an interest in understanding what the people want ;) so I gotta say I'm not sure that's a good (tm) thing, really.

I hear you. I just think that people (particularly if those people are also developers) would appreciate it if they actually heard from the IE developers a bit more. It doesn't have to be to degree where it's interfering with your actual job. You guys should stay in control of how much you interact etc. For me I would find it encouraging to know that the IE developers are just around in places like HN and are listening. I'd know that if they say something occasionally. How much you interact or how much feedback you gather would not really be the relevant issue to me.

Just a thought anyways. :)

> How can I help you get to the 100% happiness point?

* add support for websocket

* add support for webgl

* make it cross-platform

* make trident open source

Yes, I do realize the last two are very unlikely and probably webgl too as MS tends to boycot everything opengl but if they added SVG maybe there is hope for this one.

One of my favorite features of the current generation of browsers is built-in sync support. Particularly chrome, which syncs bookmarks, add-ons, form data, etc.

In terms of features, I think that's my one and only request of IE9- everything else comes down to performance and usability :)

I haven't been able to run it, since my windows computer is pending repairs, but could you please find a way to make the native client stuff google has been cocking up working in IE9?

I ask, because it would help webdevelopers like me a ton to be able to work around slow javascript.

Also, can I install it alongside earlier versions of IE?

No, you cannot install any version of IE alongside another version of IE. It's not an officially supported configuration. Microsoft supplies images for testing purposes, and that is the preferred route to take. If you want side-by-side testing, you could use the PPBs (Platform Preview Builds) instead from http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

This is why I love Hacker News. Similarly, if anyone has any comments to pass on to the Chrome team, I can oblige; although comment is welcome on our mailing lists too, of course. And.. fight!

A small pet-peeve: The downloads window calculates the speed in a non-intuitive way. I understand you display the average speed over a time so that the speed does not fluctuate too much, but the time is too long. (Or are you using the total elapsed time to calculate this?)

For example, say I am downloading at 100KBps. Even if for some reason my download stopped (due to some connection issues) the speed displayed will not immediately go down to 0. Instead it will take a very long time to gradually go down to 0. I am not sure if it will ever reach zero. Obviously this can be corrected by using a smaller time frame say 1 minute to calculate the speed of download.

I'll look into this, I can see how it'd be annoying and confusing. Thanks for bringing it up.

On Linux, Chrome is very memory-hungry. I'm using 1.2gb for 20 tabs on a fresh startup/tab restore, and it sometimes leaks like crazy, using as much as 2gb in a single process. The leaks seem slightly mitigated in the 7.x betas, but static usage is exceptionally high.

Yeah, this. I'm a web developer and a heavy Chromium user and I caught myself pondering a memory upgrade for my 8Gb desktop the other day, just for Chromium.

Obviously this is just an examples of _the_ classical trade off, but still...

This is something we're actively working on, you'll be glad to hear. After all, if we're launching an OS that's Chrome-on-Linux with huge memory leaks, we're screwed. ;)

How is the update cycle? Is it going to be as smooth as in Firefox and Chrome, or via Windows Update like Safari and Software Updates?

I don't see reason to believe we'd move away from Windows Update. Also, we can't do "silent updates" like some other browsers manage to for a variety of legal reasons. I've had this discussion internally in the past. It's a nightmare for us (how awesome would it be for me to not service IE6/IE7 folks at all today) but unfortunately, I know we're severely limited by US & international law.

Some simple stuff (compared to making IE cross platform etc) you could do to make me happy:

Features to Copy from Chrome:

(1) "Paste and Go" in the address bar.

(2) Select a URL in any webpage. Then right click-> Go to "http://the_URL.com

(3) Fitts's law law, Fitts's law law, Fitts's law law - Stick the tabs to the absolute top of the screen/window.

(4) Show download speed in the download manager.

(5) Hide "http:// in the address bar by default.

(6) Tab closing should be intuitive - See http://bit.ly/6Zahdz

(7) In javascript alert boxes show the "Prevent further alerts from this page" option after 3 or more popups.

Thanks for the very precise feedback. I am passing it on to the right folks ... note that download speed is already available, btw. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2010/09/19/show-...

Will IE9 be available on the Mac? On Linux?

Can't speculate, sorry.

The features making a website go beyond standards and into microsoft specific areas (menus in pinned sites, changing color on the chrome depending on which site you're seeing) gives me a feeling of 'this is wrong'.

Care to shed some light on this topic?

Shed more light on why you think it is 'wrong' ? No, sorry. I don't make policy decisions nor am I privy to why we do some of the things that we do. What I do know is that the people working on IE9 carry good intent and are working their butts off trying to make it the best browser out there. If you have specific problems with pinned sites/etc., lemme know and I'll be happy to point it at the right people.

It looks like a great release, I haven't had a chance to use it yet. I think putting Dean Hamatchovich on IE was a great move, I am a big fan of his work.

Three things:

a) Can you do a separate self-contained package of IE9 on MSDN? ie. the entire app in a single folder, so that we don't have to update the core OS. This will help those who want to run older IE's concurrently.

b) XP support. I know Microsoft want users to shift to Win7, but there are a lot of XP desktops still out there (I run it in a vmachine). Is there a technical reason why it doesn't run on XP? We have all of .NET on XP - so is this a political decision rather than a technical one?

c) Chrome style extensions with HTML + JS etc. These are so easy to develop, and compatibility with the Chrome manifest files for extensions would be a big win for developers, users and the ecosystem.

It uses Direct2D heavily for its graphics compositing operations - an API that was introduced in Win7 and backported to Vista but didn’t make it as far down as XP.

Thanks for the comments; I've passed on the feedback to the right people. XP itself is being sunsetted "real soon now", so it doesn't make sense to focus our energies trying to make IE9 on XP be awesome, especially when crippled back lack of D2D. It would make for a servicing nightmare. Of course, this is all my own opinion.

Some quick points:

- Spell check - that's something people use a lot and rely on. Right now I type this comment and make some typos here and there. My browser highlights them instantly. In IE9 I have to double-check each comment before sending it.

- Bonus point for taking grammar check from MS Office. It has some pretty powerful checks for some languages, notably Russian - it's amazing how far it goes! (To people unfamiliar with the matter: imagine a spell checker that checks only top 1000 words - that's how other grammar check in OO.o, Google Docs, etc. feel compared to MS Office) Actually as I think about it I become really sure that I would switch to IE just because of that feature.

- Redesign the download manager - it should be in a separate tab - not window. Trust me - that's so much more convenient and consistent!

- Do something with the top of the window. Right now it's just empty and takes some space. Either let it collapse in fullscreen so the tabs touch the top of the screen like in Chrome and Opera or put the page title there like in previous versions of IE.

Thanks for the comments; I've passed on the feedback to the right people!

[9.30 AM PST, 09/17/2010] - I've got a ton of feedback, and I'm working my way through responses, so please hang in there. :) I'll try and follow-up in the next 24 hours to th rest of the comments in here. Thanks much for understanding!

I'm having trouble emailing you. First I got an auto-response that said that I needed to be white listed. I replied to that to confirm. I got another replying saying that my email was sent, but just now I got a bounce that said that "Mail delivery failed". Can you confirm that you got my email (signed as Nogwater, but from apejet.org domain)?

I got it, apologies for this. Sounds like my TMDA (http://tmda.net/) installation is slightly wonky. I also got the gmail version, will respond shortly :-)

Still responding?

I'm finally all caught up - 09/22/2010, 9 AM pacific. If there's more feedback, please email me.

Still restart prompts after installation ? Come on, it's just a browser.

Anyway, I think it's good that they released a modern, standards compliant browser. However, I won't be switching anytime soon, since they don't provide versions for other operating systems (ubuntu is my desktop os).

>I noticed that the logo in Chrome is smaller than the logo in Internet Explorer. I found it weird till it turned out that the HTML that was rendered is different in Chrome than the one in Internet Explorer, and both refer to different logo files with different image sizes.

Did they also notice that the size of the entire page is different? The font is heavier weighted in IE, the logo is larger, and the text box is significantly larger.

Sounds like a design choice, IMO, probably due to the different text rendering (among other things) between WebKit and IE / Cleartype.

The large logo could well be a A/B test that Google may be running. I saw the large logo in Chrome earlier this week.

The large logo is part of Google Instant.

The thing about Firefox is I can just pick up my profile and take it anywhere; Mac, Windows, Linux, pretty soon even Android tablets (though the utility of that has yet to be seen.)

Chrome will get there eventually.

IE? I'm not interested in being bound to Windows devices.

re the Minor Annoyance:

Middle clicking to close tabs works fine in Firefox and even IE8 (only browsers I have on my system). No reason to complain about moving the mouse to the X button when you don't actually need to.

Different Google logos? Has this been going on for a long time?

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