Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview

windows.microsoft.com

27 pointsdherken36 comments

I just realized this:

Companies totally unaffiliated with Windows manage to produce browsers that have bleeding-edge feature parity all the way from XP through 8 (not to mention two other major OSes).

But when the company that fucking makes Windows manages to make their (less functional) browser work with a single version of a single OS they themselves produce and support, it's a news item.

The situation is much better than it used to be. However, consider that for many web developers, a quick transition from IE9 to IE10 will be a big improvement. Microsoft's sheer size and impact makes it news.

If there was a time for Microsoft to make amends for all the bullshit we, web developers had to put up with in the past 10 years or so, it is now. Hopefully they'll catch up with Firefox and Chrome.

Versus the bullshit we have to put up from the other vendors who throw out new features which everyone else has to pick up via peer pressure even though they are poorly designed?

Yes, new (or more importantly, useful) features are one of the best ways of growth. If they are poorly designed, that's another story :)

The worst part for me is having four friggin' variations of the same rule, quadrupling my loc, and making a mess of the tidiness of it all.

This does get ridiculous. Making a simple one page site that uses many new CSS3 features gets out of control. I've switched to Sass/Compass and haven't looked back.

Yeah, I was just thinking that. It might be time to use a framework where I only have to type it once, and where it only displays one line of styling.

If you're using advanced features because of peer-pressure, then more fool you.

If you're using advanced features because you've found a use for them, but you're not using SASS and mixins (or similar), then again, more fool you

The other vendors are actually churning out progress and the burden or integrating that progress into your work is entirely optional. Microsoft can't even implement years old specs, and the burden associated with their inability to create even a bog basic browser is not optional.

Which says the whole thing is a broken mess...

The specs or the new features?

On one aspect, font rendering, they have overtaken Firefox and Chrome. HN for example is way more readable on IE10.

Which strikes me as rather strange since I thought both of them would use Direct2D/DirectWrite as well by now. But demos like Scrolling Text [1] or animated text justification [2] leave much to be desired in Chrome and FF. The latter demo at least looks ok in Firefox.

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/ScrollingText/... [2] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/TextJustificat...

What makes this potentially very interesting is that Microsoft is suppose to push out IE10 to most Win7 users after it's released. Within 12 months IE10 could be the most used IE browser. Hopefully, approaching 20% market share.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the browser itself?

I'm using it right now and first impressions are that it's (subjective..) ridiculously fast, compared to IE9.

Gmail, Google Calendar and Reader are really snappy, and more importantly, (imho) the biggest UX annoyance has been dealt with: a new tab opens up and is ready for use instantly.

After using it for a few minutes on W7, it feels at least as snappy as my normal browser, Chrome. More surprising for me is that the font rendering looks better than Chrome. Hmmm.

That could be because it uses ClearType 'natively'.

New Tab performance has varied for me on different machines and installations, sometimes being instant and snappy and sometimes needing several seconds.

The greatest impact often are plugins, though, since IE still caters for plugins from the 90s by emulating appropriate events for “new browser window” when a tab is opened. Under “Manage add-ons” you can see how much load or navigation time each has.

It's yesterdays browser, tomorrow.

That may sound trite, because it is. It's also true.

It's IE9 with IE10's substandard HTML, JS and CSS stuff shoehorned in. That doesn't even make for a better IE9, it makes for a completely different beast of a browser.

Realistically, I'm only ever going to use it to browser test, so for me and possibly everyone else here on HN, the most important feature is going to be the developer tools. And in this version of IE What's not to like?

Everything. That's what. All it's good for is checking the console, but even then it's like having your debugging info spoken to you by a special needs kid with a lisp. Objects are still just the ever useless [object Object]. Minor javascript errors are enough to send it into a tailspin, followed up by an inevitable crash. I still don't understand why the console displays line numbers as links when clicking them does nothing. Profiler and Network, yeah, they do their job ok-ish, but they do the bare minimum.

Also, I wonder: when they had the meeting at Microsoft to decide what to call the "disable cache" option, which bight spark suggested "Always refresh from server" would be the best label to properly convey the feature. Probably the same bright spark who decided to make it do absolutely nothing so you still have to empty the cache every fucking time anyway.

My rating: 0/10. As far as I can tell, there's not one single aspect of it that's in any way better than anything the competition offers. Zero "things" that could earn it even a solitary point.

I'm sick to the back teeth of IE and it's bullshit. Three sarcastic cheers for yet another turd we all have to work late to support.

Have you used the Metro version of IE10? It's pretty nice. 0/10 is laughable considering how well it handles hardware acceleration and how it looks in full screen Metro mode. I use Firefox Aurora but like using IE 10 as an alternate so I don't have to install Chrome.

I thought we were talking about the "Release Preview for IE 10 on Windows 7"? That's what the post is about.

It's nice to know you have Hardware acceleration on Metro. But um... that's nothing new. I've been enjoying hardware acceleration for 2 years now. Again, it might be a new feature to IE, but it's an old feature for browsers in general.

Has the HTML/CSS inspector been updated at all?

In Chrome I'm used to being able to right-click on part of the page and go straight into Inspect Element. IE 10 still doesn't have that. As far as I can see, there's no autocomplete in the console.

I would also really miss one or two extensions, and bookmark sync across machines. So I don't think IE 10 is a contender for my main browser. Very taken with the text rendering though.

Slightly. Ever so slightly. But not in any meaningful way as far as I can tell.

Hearing mixed messages about this.

Does IE10 allow itself to software update?

If we could just have a proper implementation of that, it might mean avoiding a rerun of IE6 lingering for several years?

Fascinating. This is another way for them to send a clear message to the hundreds of millions of xp users out there who looked at 7 and rejected it: "We don't care about you, use the latest Chrome if you must".

And then they keep wondering why ie's market share is dropping like a rock.

I guess few remaining XP users actively would look for a new version of IE anyway. They could have had IE 8 and didn't update.

Many still have IE 6.0 on XP SP3 ... It's fully supported by MS.

It's in extended support but out of mainstream support by now. Just as XP.

Well, not really. IE6 is essentially dead. Throw out a few Asian countries and the market share will drop significantly.

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

The problem isn't always a lack of IE8. Government agencies often have a forced group policy that puts IE8 into "compatibility mode" so it's effectively IE7... which is only slightly better than IE6.

Considering the amount of people who whinge incessantly about the latest and greatest browser not being used, why would they then whinge that the latest operating system isn't?

So much double-think.

At the risk of engaging someone who clearly has an axe to grind, the barrier to upgrading a browser is hardly comparable to upgrading an operating system.

I agree with that point, but I think that the people who use the latest and greatest browser tend to upgrade their computers and operating systems regularly.

The rest don't know or care.

As technology experts on here, we tend to forget that the layperson doesn't generally know or care.

For a decent-sized constituency, the barrier is exactly the same: they haven't got admin rights, and the IT department installed/mandates the version they have.

And for another too: the large proportion of people who have no idea what either an OS or a browser is.

It's a mistake to imagine that everyone (and perhaps even a majority) either understands or has control of their computing.

No double-think at all.

The people you hear 'whinging' are people trying to build websites without having to add 50-100% to their dev time fixing IE-specific problems. Or unable to use features that other browsers have supported for years because half their target market is on a browser without any form of auto-update and a glacial release cycle.

I personally don't give a monkey's spleen what OS people run because the platform I am developing for is the web browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com