IE9 Release Candidate now available | Hacker News Reader

IE9 Release Candidate now available

windows.microsoft.com

34 pointszaatar49 comments

If you're seeing any crazy issues with the IE9 RC, please continue to submit feedback through the right channels [1]. However, I will be monitoring this thread too. Also, I wanted to express my thanks to the news.yc community - I saw some great commentary when Beta shipped, and some neat bug reports too, thanks for helping shape up IE9! :-)

[1] http://connect.microsoft.com/

Has the DCE bug that became the center of the SunSpider issue been fixed in the RC?

Actually, no, I don't work with JScript stuff and can't comment, sorry. I'll flag your query to the right folks, and they will look into it. Thanks!

Thanks. I look forward to the response.

I wonder if they've fix the canvas composition modes ?

"We’ve added support for the HTML5 canvas globalCompositeOperation property"

I don't see "compliant" in that sentence.

I haven't confirmed it, but I have heard [1] that it tries to download Flash content if you don't have Flash installed.

[1] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20110210#l-826

Are there any plans to offer test VM images as with previous versions?

Do you mean VMs for IE9, the final release whenever it goes live? I haven't heard anything otherwise, so I would assume, "yes". We're very serious about Compatibility, and making it simple for web developers to build websites, so I would honestly be really surprised if we stopped offering VMs. That said, the correct answer is, "I don't know".

Zaatar, I appreciate your visiting and giving us some info on things. Can you elaborate as to why the VMs are only for MS Virtual PC. A lot of us use VMWare and it is so painful and silly that we can't use it directly to test browsers. I know VMWare competes with MS in this fashion, but it's this kind of "our way or the highway" that irritates me.

Thanks - I've been wanting to test IE9 but the lack of XP compatibility prevented me from using it on the only VM OS I have.

I'd love images which work on VMware or VirtualBox (or are at least have a license allowing conversion) for Mac users

I've noticed something very tiny: Using the Windows Classic theme on Windows 7 x64, the close button of the Favorites Bar (the black X with the mouseover text "Close the Favorites Center") isn't displayed properly if the bar is very slim. Oddly on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 this doesn't happen, because here the Favorites Bar has an extra button "Add to Favorites" and the 'X' is on that button's row.

http://i.imgur.com/OgEt2.png (nevermind the "InPrivate" in the left example, in the normal mode the bar looks exactly the same)

Unfortunately I despise IE too much at this point to ever bother trying to use it again as my main browser. You made us all suffer too much over the years, sorry guys.

I really actually am actively rooting for them to fail because of this ... does it make me a bad person?

I don't think this is the right attitude to have. You should judge IE9 by its own merit, not by past misgivings. You can't (and shouldn't) be compelled to try IE9, but the reason you aren't using it should be that another browser works just fine for you, not because you wholeheartedly reject Microsoft for past suffering.

Also, it's my belief that the suffering we faced with IE is less an issue with the browsers themselves, and more of an issue with the update schedule. IE6 was very good at the time of it's release; it's a shame that it took so long for IE7 and IE8. But now, with Chrome (and now Firefox) releasing several major versions a year, we should see more and better developments in the browser space.

If for some reason Firefox, Chrome, and Opera didn't work out for me, only then would I try switching back to IE. It is the order in which I would try the different browsers that the history of IE is considered. I don't see myself considering a switch anytime soon since I love Firefox.

You should at least try it, even if you have no intention of switching. IE9 is blazingly fast on my netbook, even more so than my browser of choice, Chrome. While I have no intention of switching right now, it's a win for everyone that IE is a serious competitor - once IE9 has mainstream adoption it'll push Chrome, Opera and Firefox to be even faster to stay ahead.

That sucks, I'm sorry to hear. I wasn't there back in the "good 'ol days", so I can't comment on the past. What I can tell you is that the team we have working on IE8 and IE9 is really serious about shipping the best product out there, and we're really serious about standards-compliance. We truly are making an effort to capture feedback too ... I see it walking down the hallways, the efforts each guy is making to ship the best thing out there ... sure, we're not perfect, but we're trying really damn hard, believe me. Unfortunately, try as I might, there really isn't much for me to do to help if your argument for why IE9 sucks is that the previous IEs sucked :(

Fingers crossed that they do it right this time. Right now I informally group browsers to test into four groups: IE6, IE7, IE8, and all the rest (where it's rare to find inconsistencies or WTFs). It would be great if IE9 went into the "all the rest" category.

I've been running the beta for a couple of months now, testing sites I've been building on it as I go along. I can tentatively say that yes, it falls into the "all the rest" category for most common css/js issues that have plagued all its predecessors to varying degrees.

It has still felt too slow, bloated and plagued with dialogues ("I can run faster, disable add-ons", "This page wants to use flash" etc) to serve as my main browser (currently FF for work and chrome for play), but the sooner IE users move to IE9 the better for front-end devs the world over. Thumbs up from me to MS for IE9.

IE9 RC has a ton of bugfixes and improvements over Beta. Compatibility rates are higher. If you liked Beta, you're gonna love the RC! And we did take in feedback and refactored a bunch of our dialogs & notification system for RC too ...

I hope someone hacks it to work on XP by the end of the year (even without acceleration) so I can figure out what additional workarounds have to be done to all my stylesheets.

Hmm, maybe browsershots will eventually list it.

XP came out almost 10 years ago. Now is probably a good time to upgrade.

October, 2001

So is the base version of javascript used in most browsers today, why is age a reason to upgrade as long as it's maintained?

There is no direct upgrade path to Windows 7 from XP, and I am not rebuilding my environment and re-installing all my apps, I have a better use for my days.

XP is fast and "stable", well documented, everything runs on it. I've yet to see a good reason to "upgrade" to something else that won't even fit on a CD.

"XP is fast and "stable", well documented, everything runs on it. I've yet to see a good reason to "upgrade" to something else that won't even fit on a CD."

This just sounds like you still haven't used Windows 7. Well, if you don't try, you wouldn't know how good it is. Windows 7 is indeed fast and stable. Stability can mean different for different aspects, but Windows 7 gets updated constantly whereas XP is still open to a lot of vulnerabilities.

> There is no direct upgrade path to Windows 7 from XP, and I am not rebuilding my environment and re-installing all my apps, I have a better use for my days

You missed that.

I think I didn't miss anything. That line just tells me that he is too lazy to re-install his apps.

Upgrade path from XP to 7? Even if there is one, his hardware won't last long with Windows 7, because I'm sure he hasn't upgraded his hardwares for last decade (too lazy to even re-install apps, what more can you ask?)

I remember I had to reinstall all my apps on Mac OSX and saw no one complain. I don't understand why all these XP users complaining about not being having a way to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP.

Just say it, you just don't want to pay for Windows 7. But after all, you get what you paid for.

You just made a lot of assumptions there without anything to back them up.

I, for example am running a windows install of windows xp from 2003 repair installed through 4 different computers and finely optimized to my liking, on a Macbook Pro with a 3Ghz processor, 8GB of ram (of course it only uses 3GB) and an ssd Drive ... I have a copy of windows 7 Ultimate that I got at SxSW (Microsoft gave them out at their party) ...

I'm a busy person ... I have 60hr workweeks and thats not counting weekends ... losing a week of productivity (because thats pretty much what it would be) upgrading to windows 7 while I back up my data, install windows 7, install all my apps and try to restore the data isn't something I'm going to do anytime soon.

Obviously "everything runs on it" is no longer true.

Not for the virtual Windows instance on my Linux laptop, it isn't.

And my gaming PC is also running just fine on XP. Upgrade unlikely in the foreseeable future.

We (if you'd allow me be presumptuous) don't want to upgrade to windows 7 just to test websites in IE9 ...

Love that Microsoft never thinks about the developers who have to support these 'browsers' of theirs ... sheesh

Generally in line with guywithabike. 7 is surprisingly not-bad[1], I'd argue an actual improvement over XP unless you're running on really old hardware (relatively speaking, of course). Vista, of course, should never have existed.

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/30/

That seems oddly contradictory, since most of what's "new" in 7 from an XP user's perspective was introduced in Vista. It's not like they rolled back anything. The difference in reception between Vista and 7 was due to PC hardware having caught up with Vista's requirements and software/driver makers having fixed their compatibility problems in the intervening three years, more than anything else.

They rolled back the fail. Vista was a glitchy monstrosity similar in problems to Windows ME, 7 is remarkably stable. Or have you forgotten the endless problems people were having, attempts at refunds, and battling with PC makers to continue offering XP instead of only Vista (eventually succeeding, for the most part)? Why do you think Microsoft has continued to support XP for so long?

Yes, 7 builds off Vista. But that's because Vista was a half-complete version of 7. If they used Vista to test the waters and experiment, then yes, it quite likely helped 7, but it also screwed their image something awful, aiding in the slow adoption of 7. As a huge amount of people have demonstrated, stability and consistency are more important than shininess.

If they had run the 7 pre-release public betas earlier, they probably could have done away with Vista entirely, and been better off in the end. People are more accepting of problems in betas, especially when they're free. Instead, they essentially got ripped off for hundreds of dollars with Vista, only to be nailed with more costs to upgrade to something usable when 7 came out.

A lot of the glitchiness was due to buggy third-party drivers. It was "fixed in 7" not as a result of any changes in 7, but as a result of third parties fixing their drivers. FWIW, I ran Vista for a year both and home and at work with very few problems. (if anything, 7 was less stable for me for a while due to some NVIDIA chipset drivers, this was eventually fixed with a driver update).

By the way, I'm definitely not saying that Microsoft didn't botch its Vista release, or that all the blame for the problems people had falls on third parties. Microsoft failed to communicate effectively with its partners, kept pulling the rug underneath them with breaking changes during the betas, etc. But saying it should have never existed, but 7 should, doesn't make much sense. If they'd held off for another two years or something and just released 7, 7 would probably have had just as much of a reputation for glitchiness as Vista did.

Agreed. If you use Vista fully-patched these days, it's perfectly acceptable. The only things you find wrong are the new UI features from Windows 7 (most noticeable the taskbar improvements).

Heads-up for those with a penchant for ignoring the small print... IE9 RC will replace IE8... iow, there's no obvious way to install them side-by-side. As if anyone would really want to do that /sarcasm.

Can someone from microsoft tell me why they can't allow us just install IE6/7/8/9 side by side so we can test in them?

And no ... running a VM is not an acceptable option.

From an Engineering + Compatibility point of view, we just can't take the hit. There are way too many third party apps that host Trident, and having multiple copies puts those apps out of wack. It's simply impossible to have multiple copies of mshtml.dll on your box and have all of the IEs and all of the third party apps out there behave nicely. Even if we broke a measly 0.1% of our users, we're still talking a really huge number ... we don't have some solutions rolled out because it breaks a bunch of users, and that is not acceptable.

Disclaimer: Even though I work for Microsoft/IE, this isn't an "official" response. It's just my own opinion :)

I actually appreciate that response ... why can't they be more upfront about stuff like this especially with developers?

Try IETester:

"IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. "

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Alas, a restart was required. Hopefully watch.slingbox.com will work correctly now. In the past, I had to restart the browser when navigating to watch my slingbox.

After installing, slingbox.com worked without a hitch! Good work guys and gals! (I know, replying to myself)

Does it already have integrated support for WebM and Ogg Theora video?

Internet Explorer 9 RC supports playback of H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag and now WebM video as well when a VP8 coded is installed on Windows.

Appears no Theora support.

Does it now support css transitions/transforms?

CSS2D Transforms Internet Explorer 9 RC adds support for the CSS3 2D Transforms module, which enables elements that are rendered by CSS to be transformed in two dimensional space.

Transforms yes, transitions no unfortunately. Also, no 3d transforms, just 2d ones.

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