Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview for Windows 7 | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview for Windows 7

microsoft.com

41 pointsyread47 comments

It's kind of funny that their description of IE11-DP and IE10 further down the page are exactly the same:

> "Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview is fast and fluid, and lets your websites shine and perform just like native applications on your PC."

> "Internet Explorer 10 is fast and fluid, and lets your websites shine and perform just like native apps on your PC."

Just like native apps? I didn't realize MS had already leap-frogged things like NaCl and ASM.js in IE10... :P

Aside from the hyperbole on that page, what is actually new in IE11?

Okay, this is just utter BS:

> "Windows Internet Explorer 9 lets your websites shine and perform just like native applications on your PC."

You can write native “metro” apps in Windows 8 with web technology and the Win.JS framework.

I'm always surprised with just how much traction IE has lost in the developer/tech community. Across the couple of open source projects I maintain, only 62 of 4,847 visits have been from IE (mostly 9 and 10). I think everyone knows that most in this community don't use IE - but only 1% usage? That's crazy. Curious if this trend will ever change or if too many bridges have already been burned.

Uh. When was the last time you had to deal with cross-browser compatibility?

I think he is speaking in terms of usage by developers. IE used to be a great browser back in the day, but now it is practically the leper browser among developers.

I'm pretty sure I never thought of IE as a "great browser" and I've been doing web development for 15 years. It is probably closer than ever before to being a standards-compliant browser that doesn't require a thousand "fixes" in order to work correctly. Unfortunately, we still have to deal with IE7, IE8, and, yes, even IE9 in the wild. IE7 is becoming much less prevalent, but it is still often required for the clients I deal with.

IE5 and 6 were great browsers, and they were much better than their Netscape equivalents at the time. The problems came when they decided to stop any more development once they had put Netscape out of business.

IMO when IE4 came out, it was the best browser.

Admittedly, I'm a little young to remember the earlier IE versions, especially in the context of being a developer, but my older coworkers like to remind me how nice it was for its time. I guess the moral of the story is today's state of the art is tomorrow's bane of my existence.

You may be young, but in your final sentence you speak great wisdom.

It will be hard, but I think IE can do it.

1. With WebGL support and the other new features in IE11, they are close to finally being comparable to Chrome and Firefox in terms of being a modern browser. Yes, bridges were burnt, but IE11 and things like TypeScript are making Microsoft cool in the web space again.

2. Previews appear to show IE11 is also competitive in terms of speed with other modern browsers. (IE was already fast at 2D canvas, but not much else.)

3. The tech community was disturbed by the NSA spying scandals (that involve most major browser vendors), which led to some movement to switch to alternative browsers and search engines. Even if people don't switch entirely away, they might choose to put less eggs in one basket, so prefer to not do Chrome+google.com or IE+bing. Of the other combinations of those options (there are others of course, but just considering those), IE+google.com seems more likely than Chrome+bing, so IE might gain a little there.

Almost... and it's still in beta. Which means theyll fall behind again as soon as the next Chrome release comes out.

Yes, unless IE switches to a fast release schedule like Chrome and Firefox, it is at risk of being quickly outclassed by them once more.

Why not Firefox+DuckDuckGo? I find that more likely than a switch to IE.

This is what IE advocates have been saying since IE9, and it is no more true with IE11 than it was then.

Inertia means IE needs to be significantly better than the alternatives to catch up. It takes time and energy to switch, so the payoff has to make it worth one's while.

When Firefox came out, it offered substantial improvements over IE6. When Chrome came out, it offered substantial improvements over Firefox.

IE11 continues the "hey, we're almost caught up!" tradition that has seen IE's market spiral downward for years. Until a version of IE comes out that earns the reaction "whoa, this is much better than Chrome or Firefox!", the downward spiral will continue.

Even if IE11 has only “almost caught up”, that means, as you point out, that inertia to change will mean existing users will be less likely to switch away from IE, as alternative browsers will no longer be significantly better. Just that will help to halt any downward spiral.

Note that on Akamai[0] (who have many of the world‘s largest sites as their customers) IE’s share is relatively static. On NetMarketShare[1], IE’s share is increasing. It seems any such downward spirals has already halted. At least on two of the major analytics sites that release public data.

[0] http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html#stat=browser&t... [1] http://www.netmarketshare.com

Pray tell how using IE makes people any more or less susceptible to NSA spying than using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Chromium, etc.

And before you say certificate pinning, you know as well as I do that the NSA aren't known to have created fake Google or Microsoft keys through CAs for the purposes of spying.

Believe it or not but most browsers allow you to change the search provider, IE in particular makes this trivially easy (and is frankly a lot better at it than Chrome).

Honestly anyone who switched their browser/email client/word processor because of the "NSA spying scandal" really doesn't understand enough about technology to call themselves part of that community.

I get the feeling Microsoft has stopped trying impress power users and developers. Their market is direct to consumer, which is something they don't seem to be very good at.

I agree, not quite as extreme, but for a CSS tutorial site over the last year from 735,000 uniques 3.4% used IE. Over the last month it's 3.1%. Chrome sits at around 60%, Firefox 25%, Safari 10%.

For a lot of people I know, it coincided with the gradual migration from Windows to OSX or Linux between 3-5 years ago.

So much of front-end development is done on Macs these days, and Firefox and Chrome are so fluidly cross-platform...

If IE wanted to be taken seriously as a modern browser, as a platform, then they almost need to come out with a blazing-fast OSX version of it, which is obviously never going to happen.

> If IE wanted to be taken seriously as a modern browser, as a platform, then they almost need to come out with a blazing-fast OSX version of it, which is obviously never going to happen.

You mean something as "good" as Safari on windows?

> Snow Leopard and Windows users are not supported by the Safari 6 release at this time,[67] while there are over 121 vulnerabilities left unpatched on those platforms.[68]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

If IE wants to see usage numbers like Chrome of Firefox, then no... not like Safari.

If they are content with Safari-quality usage numbers, then they could probably settle for Safari-quality cross platform-ness.

So, it's not just me! I was very surprised to notice that only 3.92% of visitors of hashtagify.me use IE. Considering how much pain it was to make that website work with IE9 (IE8 was out of the question) I'm afraid I wasted quite some time.

The choice doesn't exist if you've moved away from Windows, and market shares of Windows are declining if I'm not mistaken.

Years ago I found it painful to have a full web dev stack on windows and switched to OSX. The company I'm working for also has linux desktops as basic setup, and macs for app developpers. It's anecdotical but I use Windows only for testing, and from a VM (I used fulls VMs for each IE versions before, now it's only the test VMs that microsoft provides)

I'm genuinely curious, why was a full web dev stack on windows so painful? And, why is OSX better?

I should put upfront that I don't think windows in itself if not usable as a web stack, and perhaps I wouldn't mind if I was working in a 100% windows shop.

But I usually work with unix/linux production servers, and that's the configuration I'd expect for most projects. So the pain points mostly come from reproducing a LAMP like environment on windows, with all the specific configurations and modules when needed.

There are little things, like small changes in the config files to adjust for windows, and there are the "why am I doing this" things like trying to compile additional/specific PHP modules on cygwin, with the dependency matching games and all the cygwin idiosyncrasies and limitations to learn first.

It's easier on OSX as compiling OSS projects requires minimal adjustments, the file system mostly behaves the same as other unixes/linux (except for case sensitiveness...), and all the unix tooling is available (no extra learning curve is a bonus). A separate linux/unix VM closely matching the prod environment would still be the best option, but most of the time OSX is good enough to not bother.

Better link - download a VM with it:

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

They just updated to include IE11 preview

Wow that's awesome. Although most of my IE users are still on IE8.

I'm sure this will be great when IE14 is out and my users have moved on to IE11.

Glad they finally gave the Dev tools an update in IE11.

It's a welcome thing for those that still need to support users running IE.

I'm using IE11 on windows 8.1 to prep our product for it.

The developer tools are a piece of shit still. The JavaScript debugger is hideous, it's clunky as hell and actually changes the page behaviour resulting in all sorts of impossible heisenbugs.

I haven't used the IE11 version yet (still on IE9 for work development), but IE9's are pretty solid. Perhaps I'm suffering from a sort of perverted Stockholm syndrome, but they work well for me. They're not without annoyances (like having to refresh once you enable debugging), but once you get past those it works as expected.

Chrome's are also very nice, but at the same time, often overblown for my needs. For what it's worth, I mainly debug minor performance issues (99.9% relating to abusing the DOM) and the odd bugs in our own software. So, while the GPU and heap profiling and whatnot are grand, for my job YAGNI at all.

And I'll probably get drawn & quartered for this, but Firebug just plain sucked the last time I tried to use it (a month or 2 ago). I can only guess that it's because it's still an add-on, and not native, but it just felt slow and clunky, and like it was all held together with bailing wire and duct tape (which, considering it's an add-on, might not be far from the truth). It's ironic because I was an early-adopter of Firebug back when it was first introduced, and it set the early standard of just how awesome in-browser debugging tools could be, but now I avoid it. I do have big hopes for Mozilla's remake of the native dev tools though, I feel it's been a long time coming.

Opera's Dragonfly is still one of the best for JS debugging.

It's sad it's going to die with Presto.

Directly beneath the announcement is a list of the most popular IE downloads:

#1 - IE 8

#3 - IE 10

#4 - IE 7...

#5 - IE 9

I do have IE on my computer (because it came with it), but I haven't used it in so long. I'm always open to going back if the browser improves. But right now chrome based seems to be the way to go from regular chrome to opera or torch browser, it's a better overall platform.

Why is it only available for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 but not Windows 8 RTM?

This is because windows 8 is a leper that will be replaced with 8.1, probably via windows update. I think there will be an upgrade path which means you'll have to upgrade to 8.1 before you can have it.

They can't loss on their loyal 7 customers either.

Because 8.1 is intended as a (free) update to 8 rtm.

So kinda like what they used to call a "service pack".

Except it ignores the original release of Windows Server 2012.

WebGL is now a real option, or at least by this time next year.

I never understood why IE had to place every downloaded item into C:\TEMP and then move the item into the darn drive I preferred in the first place.

Its probably to avoid having partially downloaded files look like completly downloaded files. A much better solution would be something like saving it as a *.download (or similar), on the drive it actually gets saved to. Saving it to C: regardless is just a stupid solution to this problem.

I see it still has the blue colors at the top, uglifying every site viewed in it. Why not be neutral, like Chrome?

I'm tired of Micro$oft's shenanigans and the IE 6/7/8/9 saga I still endure today. Never again.

Top tip: don't use "Micro$oft" if you want people to take you seriously.

I agree. 90% of my IE users are still on IE8. By the time they get IE11 I'm sure it will give me just as many issues as IE8 gives me now.

I agree. I've spent the last 5 years porting a massive enterprise platform away from a VB6/COM/IE only into .net and cross browser.

Our entire clientbase is enterprise customers. We have people who have only just upgraded to XP and IE7 (bear in mind IE8 works on XP). The amount of shit you have to go through to get IE to behave is insane. There are so many subtle bugs even up to IE10 that consistently fuck with you over and over again.

Add to that, minor upgrades fuck up stuff left right and centre. These happen suddenly and throw you right in the shit with your clients who think you've suddenly broken everything.

I have 104 hours booked against IE issues in the last two years. This is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

My only salvation is I get to do a fair bit of stuff with Linux as its part of our new architecture.

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