One more Internet Explorer to worry about | Hacker News Reader

One more Internet Explorer to worry about

thedailyt.com

9 pointsttjervaag19 comments

Is it just me, or was there absolutely no content here?

Frankly, I'm glad to see MS stepping up to the plate and working towards a better browser. If you don't like IE9, don't use it, but more competition is never a bad thing.

More competition is never a bad thing, true. But IE is so far behind it's genuinely slowing the development of the internet and it really looks like IE9.x will continue this trend.

Forget the rendering differences (for which you can argue there are legacy issues that MS should care about) the pure speed of JS in the various IE's REALLY hurts the internet. Even a moderately complex Google maps mash up requires serious thought on IE as it's just SO slow.

JS has only recently picked up speed, with vastly improved implementations in recent browser versions. It is not surprising that the one or other vendor is lagging behind, but why shouldn't they be able to catch up? So what is bad about a new IE with faster JS?

My worry is that the leading (most popular) browser is the slowest. On the web you need to work to the lowest common browser.

I only skimmed the article, but it looked as if IE9 is not that much slower than the others. I am sure they'll try to catch up before the final release.

As for IE6, I suppose Microsoft would like to get rid of it, too. I don't know who still uses it anyway - it seems to require extra effort to stick to it. Must be all the Windows 98 users?

The least common denominator is going to be IE6 for the foreseable future whether MS releases a new version or not. Maybe by the time IE9 comes out it will be IE7.

There is always going to be a large base of people who don't update their OS until they buy a new computer and who don't replace the stock browser. IE has most of those users because it is the stock browser on the leading OS, not because it hasn't made progress. As Macs become more popular I bet you will have to start supporting obsolete versions of Safari too. Fun! :)

I think the IE9, Firefox, V8 and Squirrelfish Extreme JS engines are all "fast enough". When you start performing that quickly, JS is no longer the bottleneck. The graphs the MSDN blog post has seem to demonstrate this nicely. Amdahl's Law and all that.

While JavaScript is getting faster and faster, I still don't think that JavaScript (especially DOM operations) implementations are "fast enough" yet, not even on Google Chrome. I still have to jump though hoops to get complex javascript/ajax heavy sites (approximating the richness of native apps) working reasonable quickly. There was a lot of advancement lately, but I think there's still a lot of space for improvement.

I don't think SunSpider tests DOM operations. I admit I was thinking purely of the JS engine and not of the DOM, and that the DOM is still a bottleneck. (I'd much rather the IE folks focus on DOM stuff rather than try to get raw JS any faster than they have already.)

but it feels so incredibly late in the game to improve their font rendering to acceptable, never mind pushing the limits a little.

Late in the game compared to what? The browser wars are really heating up again! Plus, it's not like the internet is going anywhere sometime soon, so it seems kind of odd to call it "late" in the game.

I have no idea what he's talking about there. Firefox supports ligatures, but ultimately relies on the OS to do the font rendering, just like IE does. DirectWrite's support for Y-directional subpixel antialiasing and subpixel positioning is what IE9 will benefit from. (A DirectWrite backend is in the works for Firefox, too.)

DirectWrite rendering is better than the next best Windows rendering, which has so far been the best rendering across OSes -- yes, this is a personal opinion, and no, I'm not interested in debating the relative merits of Windows and OS X rendering. Unless Firefox gets its DirectWrite backend first, IE9 will have the best rendering available on any desktop platform.

He lost ANY credibility when he started bashing IE's font rendering. Not only that is the same OS rendering used by Firefox, but with Cleartype is one of the best font rendering out there. Some think of it as better than OS X's.

As the parent comment said, the future is even better: DirectWrite.

So he's complaining about both a) IE is bad and b) Microsoft is trying to make it better. I suppose he'd like them to just discontinue the whole thing, then? Not the most likely, or even desirable, outcome.

No he is saying fix it properly or just don't bother - if this was released tomorrow we'd have 3 different versions of IE to worry about.

You mean 4 right?

yes...

There is a simpler solution: not worrying about IE.

Make your business model in such a way you don't need users who don't know better than not to use IE.

Perfect headline.

I stopped worrying about Internet Explorer in 2004.

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