IE10 on Windows 7 available in November | Hacker News Reader

IE10 on Windows 7 available in November

blogs.msdn.com

51 pointsshdon58 comments

IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. The article about how they increased JS speed is particularly interesting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/06/13/advances-in-ja...

What worries me is that IE11 won't be out for another year, or longer, which won't be good enough.

True. For all the bitching about Mozilla's switch to a Chrome-like rapid release schedule as well as the "virtue" of having a stable target platform to develop against, by the time IE11 becomes reality, it'll have degraded from "really good" to "outdated" at the least.

And yet everyday using it at work, the OS will boot, the cursor and HD will idle, I'll click IE10. I wait a few seconds and it appears to have loaded. I click in the URL bar. Wait. Okay, finally I can talk, nope, it loaded Bing and now it's stolen the focus on my text input. (Or vice-versa where the DOM is still largely unusable as IE render it).

Before I get a lecture on my computer, these were on brand-new-images of Windows 8 RTM that I was using on clean, very powerful machines. Chrome is still so responsive and snappy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the focus has been on JS and HTML5 and CSS3 but using IE still feels as much a chore as ever.

I think you really nailed it - MS may have solved their benchmark/compatibility problem, but does 10 solve the UX problem?

What annoys me personally on IE10, is that for some reason it autocorrects some words' first letters into uppercase. I assume it assessed that I'm from a german speaking country, but it does so in all texts, english included.

> IE10 is really good.

I feel like people have been saying that for every upcoming version if IE after IE6. It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.

Well IE10 in Windows 8 scored first at RoboHornet web performance benchmark which is released by Google http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-... .

I have a Nexus S that shipped with 2.3 and did not have smooth scrolling. Then I got the OTA for 4.0 this summer and all scrolling was totally and completely smooth. I recently updated to 4.1, and scrolling is now significantly worse than it was when the phone shipped with 2.3.

> I'll believe it when I see it.

I saw it. Then I didn't. I don't know what to believe any more!

IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has.

IE10 has IndexedDB, another major feature for apps, which only Firefox has the correct implementation of.

Among other things, IE10 is not really behind any other browser except with regard to WebGL which is very unfortunate. Of course, IE10 is really good today, but might just be "good" a year from now, which its still the most recent IE version.

IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has.

This is the problem with web development today. Until a feature is standardised enough that all of the major browsers support it or have a viable alternative available, none of these shiny new toys is really a change-the-way-you-develop type of feature for most people. In particular, no-one doing real work can use them unless they are lucky enough to be able to dictate which browser their customers/clients/colleagues should use.

Still, certain browser vendors persist in releasing a new version every five minutes with yet another pre-beta-quality add-in that no-one except a handful of Internet-famous web designers writing blog posts is going to care about. The IE team release less often, which personally I think is actually a very good thing in terms of stability and building real web sites/apps, but it doesn't make their exclusive features worth any more.

Grid Layout, the propreitary CSS feature that has a working draft with one author (guess the company). It is very nice, but there are other tools and box-models that work well and/or are in development with more parties.

I'm surprised to hear that IE10 has IndexedDB and that support for it is so poor. That's useful information to know and I feel like I just found a blind-spot that I didn't previously. Thanks.

>It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.

Have you tried an Android phone at any point in the last 12 months? I absolutely do not believe that you have tried an Android device that ships with ICS or JB.

Does it render websites like every other browser, or am I, as a front end developer, going to have to keep adding <!--[if IE10]>, <!--[if IE9]> etc to catch their quirks?

IE10 doesn't support conditional comments, which is a good indicator of their confidence that it works now. In my experience so far, if IE10 supports something, it works fine - no additional testing required.

I've stopped using conditionals for anything newer than IE8. I still have to make workarounds for IE (usually by just fiddling with the CSS). IE9 is far from perfect and is still a timesink, this is time that could be spent making resources reusable or optimising content.

I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?

Yeah, and they should get rid of Office while their at it, I mean we already have Open Office, nor should they stop there they should get rid of their closed source operating system, I mean we already have open source Linux distros. They should get rid of Windows 8 and just contribute to Ubuntu!

But that's not the point.

Let's say MS rolled V8 and Webkit into IE. They still get to build their own UI/ux and get to set the default search engine to Bing. They start contributing to webkit and everything gets faster.

There are plenty of things to implement in a browser beyond the rendering engine, so why create a whole new one that web devs need to support?

Removing the operating system tie-in alone would be worth it. Unfortunately MS still lives in a world where people should pay upfront for their web browser.

Please, please - Never let Microsoft contribute code to Webkit. Let them never hire a developer who has even looked at that codebase. As soon as they do, they'll roll their own propietary version, with 'extra' incompatible features, and all the bugs and security holes that come whenever Microsoft touches anything.

That role is actually held by webkit nowadays, with webdev using only -webkit-* css properties (without including the non-prefixed one) and webkit not dropping their prefix once something has been standardized.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#q... for instance

Competition in the browser space is a great thing - it is the reason there is so much progress in the field.

Remember when IE was the only browser worth worrying about? Wasn't development so easy because IE was the only browser you had to support, and IE was miles ahead of its competitors like netscape navigator? The result of that was stagnation, and I would rather not go back there.

We've got Windows and Linux, Apple should just drop OSX.

I'd settle for Microsoft dropping Windows. We already have OSX and Linux. There is no need for anything else ;-)

IE9 and 10 are rendering my canvas test suite faster than Chrome dev or canary.

I just ran the tests again:

Chrome Canary: 809 tests in 15.714 seconds

IE10: 809 tests in 11.383 seconds

FF16: 809 tests in 26.768 seconds (wtf? this used to be on par with chrome, might be a gpu option I disabled)

edit: Firefox times were off because I apparently had disabled GPU ever since this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387

Unfortunately the Firefox canvas bug is still there for non-gpu users. Both FF and Chrome have ignored nearly all non-security canvas bugs that I've filed :(

I have seen a drastic decrease in FF performance for canvas related operations too. Some time after FF12 it became about 4 times slower. Here is a little test page I made to see if it gets fixed:

http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance

Until it gets fixed I use chrome.

Now its FF17 and its still slow.

Weird. Trying your page, I get approx 46fps on Chrome 22, 85fps on Firefox 16. Perhaps graphics card/driver related? (This is on a 5 year old Core 2 Duo at 1.86GHz, with a GeForce GT8800 on Windows 7).

Windows 7. FF 91 Chrome 53

I'm guessing you're using Linux or integrated GPU

That's strange, I'm getting between 87-90fps on FF16 on Windows.

Yeah, but in 5 years, how good will this "good" be? We'll still be dealing with it when that time comes.

>IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good.

I'd have to disagree. Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Does it have in browser spell-checking? Large library of secure addons? Built in PDF viewer? Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) IE 9/10 has essentially no modern end-user features other than tabs, which are arguably ancient.

>Does it have bookmark/password syncing?

Yes.

>Does it have in browser spell-checking?

Yes.

>Large library of secure addons?

No.

>Built in PDF viewer?

No. (Although, Windows 8 does have a reader app)

>Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?)

Yes.

It sounds like you've never used IE10?

I only checked the new features list compared to IE9 so that's why I missed spell check and sync. But it is still a huge stretch to call IE10 a good browser compared to it's competitors considering spell checking is more than half a decade old and bookmark sync has been around for more than a year, and it doesn't even have the other features on my list. It hasn't even caught up with feature leaders like Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.

Isn't it more important that a browser implements, well, web browsing? I don't think any of the features you mentioned is particularly significant, relative to a robust rendering engine that supports useful technologies like HTML5 and widely accepted parts of CSS3, fast performance running JavaScript, and simply being a stable, secure product.

In any case, if you're going to pick on usability features, you could just as well criticise Firefox's tabs architecture, which has horrible security and performance problems as a result of fundamental architectural flaws that every other major browser overcame years ago. Or the way Firefox and Chrome move UI elements around or subtly change their appearance with each new release. Or the way Chrome looks more like a glorified app store every six weeks after it actively circumvents the basic security model of my computer's operating system to update itself. Or plenty of other problems with mainstream browsers that IE hasn't had for years, for that matter.

I have recently joined Microsoft and on my work PC I am happily using IE 10 for a while (evenings, I am a Safari OS X and Chrome user). It just works great, does not over consume memory and resources, provides a seamless experience as good as competitors. frankly, lack of plugins issue still exists, though. IE is no longer a pain in the ass for developers. My blog (html5, responsive CSS) works just fine on IE.

Disclosure: these are not my employer's opinions, only mine.

This is good, I guess?

I have never understood (even when I was a Windows user) why they locked most of their browser upgrades to the OS. This is perhaps the greatest reason why their market share falls every year.

It's usually because it's tied to some sort of OS-level new feature. In the case of IE10, it's the rendering engine for (some kinds of) Metro style apps. If you're providing infrastructure for some new features, it's easy to rely on other new infrastructure, and pretty soon you can only run on the new OS. It probably was a serious effort to back-port it like this, although it's also possible IE10 represents a new model that changes things.

Because that was the way to put Netscape out of business. By tying the browser with the OS they made sure that every new PC would be running IE. In the long term of course this was an awful decision since upgrades come once every couple of years.

Although I'm a .NET developer I sincerely hope that IE dies. IMHO it is the worst mistake MS ever made, by slowing down upgrade cycles that much they managed to alienate every web developer/designer out there by making their life miserable trying to fix pages that didn't work in IE.

Because the IE component is a core component of the operating system that other apps can rely on.

Just for Windows 7? So now they are giving up on supporting Vista, too? Going by this trend, IE11 will only support Windows 8. Meanwhile, Chrome and Firefox support all Windows versions up to XP.

They gave up Windows XP with IE 9. Keeping the same trend, they are giving up Vista with IE 10. In fact, Microsoft is actually getting worse. They are already treating Windows 7 users as second class citizens. IE 10 for Win 7 will only get a preview release in mid-november. Final release will probably come a few months after that. In comparison, Opera still supports Windows 2000, although it recommends at least using Windows XP.

"They are already treating Windows 7 users as second class citizens."

Really? How so? Will I be frisked when I attend the NTSSUG meeting at their facilities tomorrow? Or do I have to open my laptop and show the Windows 8 image running in VMWare to gain entry?

If IE 11 and a few shitty "Formerly known as Metro" apps is the only thing that Windows 7 users are missing, I wouldn't call that discrimination.

Really? Windows 8 is yet to be released, and Microsoft is already delaying product releases for Windows 7. I am already on Win 8, but if I was a Win 7 user, I would be pretty pissed. And going by their track record, in two years they are going to drop support for Win 7 altogether in Internet Explorer and other applications like Windows Movie Maker.

Seeing as mainstream support for Vista ended in April of 2012, I don't see this as a big shock.

Also, Vista usage is already hovering at around 10-12% of all users, so as Windows 8 is released we should see that number decrease gradually.

Vista user here. I'm pretty much waiting on 8 so i can upgrade.

Chrome and Firefox aren't interested in selling OS upgrades, which means they're not going to cannibalize their own sales. If we look at the closest comparison (i.e. OSX/Safari), it looks like Windows/IE is doing a little better with respect to the duration of the platform support. The version of OSX released at the same time as Windows 7 is Snow Leopard (10.6) and it doesn't look like it'll be getting any more Safari updates (last one was 5.1.7 in May 2012, current is 6.0 on 10.7 and 10.8 only).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history#Version_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_versions

Nice, I'll be upgrading my VM. IE 10 lets you switch between IE 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 modes. Interesting that 6 isn't in there. IT 9's compatibility modes are super useful for testing.

Careful, you'll be updating your VM to a preview.

Might want to wait on that a bit.

He can always update a copy of the VM.

That's the beauty of virtual machines. You take a snapshot, you experiment to your heart's content. You don't like where you are, one click and 3 seconds later, you're back to where you started with absolutely zero data loss.

Zero data loss? All the data generated post snapshot will be gone.

Right, but for a test VM (my case), that doesn't matter.

Even Microsoft can't work with IE6. It really is incredible how almost a decade of stagnation and bad ideas, as well as poor corporate policies, hurt the web and IE for so long.

Similarly, IE9 allows you to select IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE9 Compatibility Mode. In my experience these browser modes are not identical to their stand-alone counterparts. If you are serious about finding and fixing layout bugs for IE7/IE8 users, you really should roll an XP VM for each of those browsers. Notably, IE8 users commonly browse in IE8 Compatibility Mode which has its own quirks as well, and it's completely unavailable in IE9.

I wish I didn't have to know this stuff.

Are they going to continue with the silent updates for consumers? In 6 months, IE9 should be in the low single digits and IE10 should be the most widely used IE browser.

Since when do they do silent updates? I heard they were pushing out IE as a recommended update via windows update, but don't you still have to click through the massive IE installer to actually perform the upgrade?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16214912 apparently from Jan 2012.

the comments over there pretty much sum up my general sentiment since they went silent about IE10 on win7. every one of their blog posts has comments asking wtf.

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