An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
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OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit?
I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe).
See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk about anything that really matters in the world.
Do I get more denial-groupthink downvotes with this one?
I wonder if this will get me banned. I'm not trying to get banned, but it might happen. It'll be interesting to find out.
I was just trying to spread awareness. It feels weird to even say that, but something has to be done. Of course, it could be argued that this is not the place for warning the world about the insanity that is Islam, but what is?
There's no forum in the world for talking about how dangerous Islam is, where people wouldn't already agree.
HN on the other hand, is full of intelligent people who certainly should be able to handle coming across material that is unpleasant to digest, and adjust their world views accordingly.
There really was some kind of protest full of enraged muslims in London, who were pretty much saying that they'll destroy Europe, and it sure wasn't the only enraged protest they've made. They really genuinely did kill a man for making a short movie that talked about Islam. Shouldn't this kind of stuff at least raise an eyebrow or two? Can you really dismiss all of this as Crazy Talk? Should you? Or should you maybe find out for yourself? Go on, confirm that I'm crazy. I dare you!
There's a blogger in Finland who's been talking about Islam & (muslim) immigrants for years, but only became famous last year when enough people noticed. He became the victim of a nation-wide witch-hunt lead by the local media, and eventually even got fined for something he said on his blog. You see, in Finland we have freedom of speech as long as we're careful not to say anything unpleasant. I was somewhat surprised he didn't get thrown in jail.
What the blogger has done requires giant balls of steel. What I'm doing here is the only thing I'm aware I can, however misplaced or aggravating it might be.
Also, "hitler".
Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major products and access to give feedback to people who care.
Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil', just the inertia of a huge company).
You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to tell me why they're all invalid? I've done this kind of thing before, and every time someone disparages MS here, he's treading on thin ice. There will always be MS-apologists around.
Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years
They sure have made a show of being more "open" to please/distract programmers, that's all.
You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
I realize this is something that people don't want to hear, and can't process without adjusting their conceptions of things, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Want some content? Here's a video of angry muslims in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20. One of the signs they're proudly displaying says "Europe, you will pay. Your annihilation is on its way!!!".
Does that sound a tad threatening to you? That protest is probably related to events in 2004, when they actually killed a Dutch film director, Theo Van Gogh, for releasing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 .. Yes, they killed a man for making a short movie.
The average muslim you meet will most likely tell you that Islam is a "religion of peace", but what they don't mention is that if you say otherwise, they'll kill you. If it's such a mellow religion, why is there a protest full of its followers waving signs saying that they'll destroy Europe then?
Western people believe the line about a religion of peace because they want to, because we should all just get along and coexist in peace and harmony. That's just the humane way of life that we as Westerners are wired to like and want, but that's not what muslims have in mind.
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Update:
Quick! Someone call PG and get him to delete this thread so no one else will see what I'm saying here!
They are invalid in a discussion about IE9 developments because they aren't about IE9. They are valid in a discussion about web development in general... except they are arguing against your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development and not destroying a competing browser. In other words, Microsoft has moved on from those (e.g. this page) so those aren't good support for your complaints anymore.
People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?
I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online.
Islam
Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots. Particularly don't want to discuss religion or country/world politics on HN, even more so in a thread about an IT topic. By the way, I also don't want to discuss dishwasher detergent, pie recipes, good books on optical illusions or how to build a canoe.
Well then, why did you insist that I should "support my whining"? I'm pretty sure my "whining" was just as not related to IE9 as it is now.
Besides, if you squint and look really hard, you'll notice my goal here was not really to discuss the finer points of IE 9. You've obviously got a problem with that, but how much would you surmise I care?
They are valid in a discussion about web development in general... except they are arguing against your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development and not destroying a competing browser.
I take it that MS discussing IE 9 on a blog means that they actually never did any of the things I listed?
People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?
Wouldn't this be related to "holding back web development"?
I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online.
Glad you came clean. Even I realize that they've been working hard to improve the .NET platform. They have to, because their grip on the world is dependent on developers, developers, developers.. Did you see what they did to improve IE while they weren't worried? Oh that's right! -Nothing.
Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots.
See, now that's the exact same problem I'm trying to solve. You should know that there are people following a 1300-year-old sacred manual on how to behave that says "kill everyone who's not a muslim", and it's happening in 2000-fucking-9.
You don't see Christians going on Crusades anymore, but you do see enraged muslims shouting that they'll destroy Europe. And Europe's collective reaction? -To apologize, look away, and hope that they calm down.
I guess I'll say the same about your terrorist scaremongering and call it a day then. Nice talking with you.
Are terrorists known for holding protests on London's streets where they shout they'll destroy Europe? No? What are those people then?
You call it scaremongering, I could call it trying to dislodge heads from asses, or just "trying to spread awareness" as I said earlier.
As more things move to the web, built on web standards, they can't afford to continue having the worst browser by far.
(Apologies for bitterness, I spent a lot of today back porting a Very Large Web App to IE6.)
I've been working on a client-side app since before IE7 came out. The much hyped IE7 release gave us some performance benefits, but apart from that it just added another IE release that had to be tested and tested.
IE8 made things even worse.
We now have scenarios that work fine in all recent (going back 1 to 3 major versions, you know, everything over the last few years) of Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but IE? Hahaha, you must be joking. It works in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7. Or just in IE8, or in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7...
And now they're threatening to unleash yet another IE version.
Why couldn't they just stick with IE8 for the time being and fix things there? (And don't tell me 'the version number is just marketing', we all know that major releases entail lots and lots of changes and 'fixing things we messed up before').
They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
Just think how hard it would push webkit/mozilla/chrome if they did manage to beat them on speed. It would push them to get even better. Compeition is always good as long as 2 or more projects stay alive.
You've just made an enemy out of every web-dev on HN :)
What is a compelling reason is revenue loss in their cash-cow franchises like Office. If they come to believe that they need a version of Office that works in the browser or they will lose revenue, then developing a fast version of IE is very important. If they believe that people won't use a computer that doesn't provide them with great experiences on the sites they love right out of the box, then developing a standards compliant version of IE is important.
If people need to use a particular older browser for a very narrow application, then they should keep an installation of that browser around for that specific purpose.
Its the same idea with modular programming methods. I build my js in modules. My comment system is separate from my login system. In the last couple of days I have been updating the Facebook Connect logic in my login system and I haven't had to worry about updating logic in my comment code.
I agree it's almost definitely technically infeasible.
I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...
I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially a "game" running on top of DirectX, no?
Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming you had a good card with good drivers.
What am I missing? (I haven't done any Windows work in 5 years).
"Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes up so it can position the next item- But the picture accompanying the post is wrong/irrelevant.
A true vector placement of each character gives you the ability to show type at any subpixel offset and then anti-alias, and I think there's a good chance they're doing this.
See this Loop/Blinn paper for more details: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblin...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-d...
No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).
Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have significant usage - at least within companies.
Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one sponsored by Apple.
Geee, I wonder why?
Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any other major browser????
I can do all of that in IE 6, 7, or 8, without maxing out a CPU core.
What I can't do, and really would like to do, is offload more of the page rendering to Javascript, and the only reason I can't do that is because of the various noscript users out there.
Next thing you know we'll have commercials saying "IE9? That was my idea!"
still no canvas or svg... jerks.
They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
Had it been a "minor improvement" over IE8 and were it aimed squarely as a competitor to Chrome or Firefox, I would doubt it would ever launch. Just preventing companies from rewriting internal web apps to be more cross-browser-friendly would be sufficient accomplishment.
If you plotted just the rightmost cluster (IE 9, FF 3.6, WebKit nightly) on its own graph with a scale that went from 0 to, say, 1500 instead of 16000, it would be very clear that IE 9 is still slow compared to it's peers -- nearly 3x slower than WebKit as noted by the earlier comment.
It's quite an improvement, but here's hoping they keep optimizing.
(If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent PNG....)
It doesn't really matter though - the point is, they still have a long way to go before they can earn back the trust they've squandered amongst the web development community.
No announcement yet on @font-face, canvas, video. Basic performance improvements.
It's possible that IE will implement the upcoming WOFF (Web Open Font Format) standard in IE9 but I wouldn't rely on it.
Thanks a bunch for the info.