Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Aims To Close Performance Gap With Internet Explorer 9
Barence writes "Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers. The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance. 'We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers,' explains Internet Explorer's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch. As well as improving performance, Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces."
will still suck.
Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces
Anyone else get the feeling Dean hasn't really been keeping up with recent developments? If that's IE's general manager, it explains much.
If they succeed. We are already forced to delete Linux to play games, now we'll have to delete Linux to surf the web!
The ACID conformance is still at a dismal 30% compared to 90% of chrome, Safari and Opera.
The internet willstill be divided into 2 - the Microsoft world and the Real, Normal world.
Shame, really. So many years, and the leopard has yet to change its spots.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Sweet! I can't wait to replace Firefox on my MacBook Pro and my desktop Ubuntu box with this, it will run awesome on those! I wonder when I'll be able to get AdBlock for it?
I can't believe all these browsers talking about speed and performance loading. It's a website for peet's sake!
FIX THE MEMORY ISSUES!
I have 4 add ons for FireFox(latest version) in Win7. 4 tabs open for 30+ minutes and the memory usage skyrockets. After 2 hours Firefox gets very sluggish. The same for IE.
My pages load fast enough. FIX the damn memory issues. Stop adding features. Stop trying to make the app sexy.
Fix the real issues.
Hardware acceleration of text and pictures is one thing. Javascript performance is quite another. What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine. Two school computers, one running Chrome (out of my home directory - bad sysadmin!) and the other running IE8, have very obvious differences in their Javascript speed on a benchmarking test (Sunspider, FYI). (They're school computers, their hardware should be exactly the same, their uptime should be exactly the same, etc. etc.)
So, where is Microsoft going in this category?
Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
...users will finally be able to browse the Crysis website with acceptable framerates.
Firefox is my primary browser, but I'm not in love with it by any means. It just has so many integrated Add-On that I cannot live with out. Copy the Firefox Add-On system and I'll take a look at your browser.
Oh yeah I also want working keyboard shortcuts.
Which is another way of saying that IE9 will be such a resource hog that even the highly advanced eight core systems we'll be using in a few years will not be powerful enough to run it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
And GM and Chrysler will finally deliver a consumer vehicle that can compete successfully against the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic respectively... meanwhile, Hell's freezing temperatures will so profoundly affect the Earth's climate that the debate over global warming will be made moot.
One of the things I used to like about Microsoft is that, though their initial releases were terrible, by a few years later they usually weren't bad But nowadays it seems like everything is a rewrite that introduces new bugs. Trident is bad enough as-is; do we really need a rewrite introducing new bugs? And I bet that, once all is said and done, they still won't support PNG alpha...
I hope they work on stability, memory usage, and the pre-rendering speed! I've found IE8 to be less stable and use more memory than recent past versions of IE. And just getting a new blank tab to come up often involves a fair amount of thumb-twiddling. And despite whatever usage of different processes for different tabs they claim to be employing, I find that the entire browser usually hangs and crashes when there is a problem with a page. Rendering speed and font readability are the least of their problems!
Now it will incorrectly render my pages twice as fast!
Seriously, IE has become a verb with me and my web developer friends. We even use it in general conversation: "That guy cut me off and I told him to go IE himself."
More surface area for exploits, yeah!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Which is another way of saying that IE9 will be such a resource hog that even the highly advanced eight core systems we'll be using in a few years will not be powerful enough to run it.
Better performance == bloated?
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsetter.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Doesn't sound like Microsoft will be fixing the performance, but instead just taking the problem and using other resources to help deal with it. I'd would say something like cleaning the code, fixing memory leaks etc. would be a far better way to go, but I suspect Microsoft isn't able to accomplish such a goal with any of their products. I have (like I'm sure many here) a nice display on my desktop that shows the percentage of cpu load at any time, but with software companies like Microsoft now making use of the power of graphics cards it's time to update those cpu load programs to included the load on graphics card so I can still see the damage being done but various programs live. And I also agree with a lot of the posts so far, it's not the speed to load/display webpages it's the memory leaks etc. that's the real problem, shifting some of that to graphics cards really won't help much.
Please correct me if I'm wrong or fill me in on what I'm missing but the thing that's always bugged me about web standards is when they started MS had just about 100% of the market share. When the standards were ratified that put MS' compliance at about 10% or whatever. Why were the standards targeted to a non-existent browser?
Don't get me wrong standards are important and MS needs to get in line with them; I just don't understand why the standards are what they are
'We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for Windows-only web developers,' explains Internet Explorer's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch.
Welcome to the new IE. Same as the old IE.
I look forward more to resolution independence. It would REALLY nice to express a picture or font's width in terms of screen (or table) proportion, instead of pixels (ugh).
It would save everyone so much time. Let's hope super-super high resolution monitors (OLED anyone?) come shortly to make this more of a reality.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
But then my iexplore.exe locked up with explorer.exe.
...built in, in line spell check, now that every other frikin' browser on the planet has one. And how about the ability to make permanent exceptions for sites with mismatching SSL certs so I don't get a warning message every time I access webmin on my linux server on my home network? Seriously, most of the time I'm on the web I'm in Gmail or on a forum. Spell check is not a luxury, its a necessity. Speed and Acid 3 compliance do not keep me using Firefox, spell check, and adblock do.
If using direct-x, mean more direct access to the privileged code, for CSS/javascript bugs It looks like a good idea. A better javascript engine, or a better architecture, is a good idea, but giving more direct access to the hardware to something as "external" as third party javascript/css, seems a bad idea. Microsoft, don't do that, is a bad idea.
IE is already very fast, faster than Firefox. Fix all the CSS bugs, make it a better supporting the standards browse, or start another browser from scratch if the oldcodebase don't support the changes needed.
-Woof woof woof!
When I read the post the first image I got was John Hodgman saying 'Trust me, this time it's going to be different'.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
In addition to better performance, this technology shift also increases font quality and readability with sub-pixel positioning:
they say "sub-pixel positioning", but the example shows aliased vs. anti-aliased font rendering.... *really*? that's their "closing the gap w/ rivals" strategy? WOW.
http://kered.org
Still no full PNG support, therefore still a dud of a product.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Quote: "We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers"
Translation: "We're adding more ways to lock you in and exclude others from the stuff you build"
Article: "revamped rendering engine"
Translation: "Your old stuff will break again"
Quote: "the score will continue to go up" (after reaching only 32 of 100 points in ACID 3)
Translation: "we don't intend to go for the full 100"
I'm not impressed. Their aim should be 100 points in ACID3, a full implementation of CSS 2.1 and a list of CSS3 draft items they want to support. Also backing html5 would have been a good idea. Their communication doesn't go into that direction. "The score will go up" is rather weak. IE9 will still be the entry level of browser when it appears.
We don't need another broken IE.
Do it right or leave it.
They should put a "compatibility button" in this version as well to make it compatible with FF. Do they even run FF to see what a great browser can do?
I think GP is referring to using more resources (hardware acceleration) to barely pull out mediocre performance.
Out of curiosity, where does any one know where MS normally aims if not at improving performance?
Reminds me of sales people who being their spiel with "Can I be honest with you?" I've always wondered what they were being before if they feel they need to ask permission to be honest.
from the look of it (I RTFA) I see progress. It's about time.
I find the choice of DirectX quite interesting, I've been looking recently at doing some basic game programming again just for a bit of fun and was rather shocked to find what an utter mess graphics programming has become on the Windows platform.
Many years ago, when I last played around with graphics programming it was pretty straightforward, you used DirectX or OpenGL. For your game editors you'd use MFC or the Win32 API (or something 3rd party like SDL). It didn't really matter which you chose, but if you chose say C++, OpenGL and MFC for example you'd just use those for your editors, the game engine, you could use that one set of technologies for your entire development process.
Fast forward 10 years to the point we have things like Java and .NET offering perfectly acceptable managed code performance, with the benefits you'd expect from managed code- no worrying about deleting variables, pointers and so on, you can just write your code and it works, and works on whatever platform there is a VM for. Tools like Visual Studio have taken forward editing of the interface fairly well for Windows Forms and such and WPF. I thought great, .NET, Windows Forms, XNA, making an editor and a game will make no time at all.
What should have happened in the last 10 years:
The single toolchain should still exist, but with the benefits of managed code, .NET and such to make development across the relevant platforms (i.e. for the XBox 360 and PC with XNA) much more quick and easy.
What actually happened:
GDI is crap, they release DirectX and GDI+. Later .NET came along, Microsoft thought, hey, we need a managed version of DirectX and created Managed DirectX. They start thinking about interfaces for the future and realise GDI+ and Windows Forms don't cut it, apparently DirectX isn't to stray from games related stuff so they release WPF which has it's own 2D and 3D rendering libraries. They want XBox development, using C++ or C# with DirectX would be too easy, so instead let's create a new API and set of tools, called XNA they think. Great, and XNA is quick and easy to get to grips with, I'll give them that, in fact, it's so easy they decide to ditch Managed DirectX because it's now obsolete. But wait, what's that? XNA makes it easy to import content and compile it into the executable but is crap for your Windows level editors because it's not designed for loading content on the fly? The recommendation for managed Windows apps is WPF, but what use is that when my game engine is in XNA because it needs to run on the 360? What about editors that require decent 2D rendering of primitive shapes rather than sprites? WPF is great, XNA isn't so again, half the project in C# w/ XNA, half in C# w/ WPF? Somewhere in there along came Direct2D which gives you your 2D but then it's back to C++ for half the project and C# for the other half. So we now have Direct3D, Direct2D, GDI+, WPF, XNA and the obsoleted Managed DirectX all to do very similar tasks, but neither allowing you to do so with a single toolchain for something like an Xbox 360/PC community game that requires decent windows editors. There are 3rd party solutions like SlimDX which is a managed wrapper for DirectX but it's still a port to XNA for the community game. Effectively with have GDI/GDI+ for low end Windows forms 2D rendering, WPF for high end Windows Forms rendering, DirectX for C++ graphics development, XNA for Xbox and Windows development, but not for use in Windows applications that need decent 2D primitive support and to load models on the fly etc. Oh, and if you previously jumped on the Managed DirectX bandwagon, then, well, apparently it's tough shit.
I can't help feel Microsoft have really dropped the ball- DirectX could've done the lot if the project was managed properly. Quite why they didn't stick with DirectX, keep Managed DirectX and integrate these into WPF for rendering purposes I don't know. We've gone from a fairly unified graphics pipeline to multip
Better dust off the old "This site designed for..." icons again. Thanks Microsoft, just what I wanted, to go back to the internet circa 1997! Should we dig out the hampster dance, too?
This is their way of saying the IE 9 will still not comply with standards, but will do all this other stuff which once you code you page for, you're fucked. After I read the contents of internal emails within MS which were revealed in the court cases, I decided to take some slightly more "aggressive" techniques to promote Firefox (I don't trust chrome). The other day I was helping the IT guy with what to put in our new organization's computers before he imaged everything and deployed the images. I finished up that and then when ahead and deleted the IE icon from the desktop (made FF default) and from pinned items. I did the same to my parents' computer. I told them "The e is not the internet, the red one is." I also, whenever I get a chance, pass casual comments like "you're still using IE..heh" (social proof is a powerful thing). That's just some of the stuff that comes to mind.
The highly advanced 8-core system I'm using now can't run it. Unless they've brought back IE support for Solaris/SPARC.
.
Why does Microsoft think the rest of the software world will remain stationary while Microsoft lumbers forwards at its own bloated pace.
The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the actual rendering of the browser window isn't the bottleneck.
As well as improving performance, Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces.
Doesn't ClearType do this already?
As a web developer I hate to see a new IE despite the possibility of improvements... It will just mean more different incompatible IE versions to test and maintain code for us (IE6 will still have a marketshare when IE10 comes uit... although they will probably rebrand it to InternetX).
Good thing there are JavaScript libraries like jQuery that fill some of the gaping holes in IE standards support and make it usable like a normal browser... the funny part is that when the IE javascript engine is finally on par with modern engines like V8 the real life speed will still be slower since IE is wasting a lot of time working around incompatibilities (which of course requires extra JavaScript calls to make it work)...
Microsoft's solution to inefficient resource utilization == throw more hardware at it.
You would still be stuck with IE6 otherwise. :-)
You lucky Linux netbooks came along or you still be stuck with Vista.
In fact, the fear free software creates inside MS you owe much too....
Why can't MS just let IE die. It's been such a fail since around IE 5/6 when websites started to use more CSS and JavaScript (or shall be say JScript?). I don't know how many hours and hours I have lost to IE because it wouldn't render a website correctly which every other freaking browser (FF, Safari, Opera, Chrome) renders correctly. I feel MS should pay compensation to every webdeveloper out there due to all the headaches their complete piece of junk has caused everyone. I'm not a person who normally hates, I'm all for loving, sharing and giving but I hate, hate, hate - HATE! - IE and MS. The only reason why I had to buy Parallels Desktop for my Mac (80€) was so I don't have to turn on my old Windows system to test websites with IE. MS should give me back those 80€, at least.
My biggest problem with IE is not speed, resource usage, the tabs system, or anything like that.
I use firefox for one reason and one reason only. It has some excellent addons for it because there is a very well-defined place to GET addons, and anyone can submit one easily.
Not to mention that FireFox isn't worrying about trying to ensure people don't compete with them on their other products.
My five essential addons for FireFox are:
- AdBlock Plus (of which the more important part is the filters that are auto-updated)
- NoScript
- FoxyProxy (specifically for selecting a proxy by the URL automatically)
- User Agent Switcher
- Download Helper
I've not personally seen a nice central site like FF's addons page to manage addons - and without something like this, upgrading has to be done manually for each, and you are responsible for checking for updates and such. A pain in the arse.
Subpixel positioning is something NEW?! ClearType has been supported in Windows for ages, man. And it was even turned on by default in IE7 engine (even if the rest of the system didn't have it on).
All this "improved graphics" stuff sounds like DirectBullshit to me. Well, at least they have tranparent PNGs now.
I typically keep 30-50 tabs open in FF
I can't keep track of 10 to 15 tabs. I can not imagine why one would want 50 tabs open at a time. You must be quite special.
We absolutely, positively promise that this is going to be the last version for Windows XP! No exceptions!
Great... So now instead of hogging too many CPU resources, IE will just hog resources on my GPU.
Drawbacks:
1) Slows down my other applications that use my GPU (Solidworks, games, etc)
2) Causes my system to consume more electricity than if I had used a faster (more CPU or hardware resource efficient) browser.
3) Means my framerate is going to decrease if I browse the web while using IE while playing a windowed game or watching a 1080p video. This is something I actually do since my wife sometimes likes to watch a video on display #2 while I use display #1 for other stuff.
Benefit:
1) Faster (more responsive) web experience.
Does this single benefit outweight the disadvantages? Perhaps, but I prefer the rival browser's approach to speedier browsers -- build a browser that renders pages more intelligently so that rendering requires fewer CPU/GPU/whatever resources.
they are trying to converting ie9 to use more directx apis...
DO NOT WANT
this is a large part of the reason people still can't migrate off of ie6, stop using this trash !
Microsoft has habitually depended upon the speed and power of the machines that run its software rather than optimizing for smaller, more efficient and stable object code.
Call me an old fogey (many already do) but when I started coding, I was very concerned with small and efficient object code. I wrote in assembly language and C and coded for an environment limited to 64K. Even though such constrictive environments are rare these days, the lessons and habits are quite valid and useful. One should be thrifty with computer resources when writing code. CPU cycles, memory usage, screen usage and anything else that takes up time or space should be considered. I know that many eye-popping graphics simply take memory. I accept that much. But object code does not need to take as much as it does.
But Microsoft also seems to play pretty lose when it comes to slipping in extra crap into their OSes and applications. Vista is slow and few people ever talk about why in great detail. The encrypted data flowing through its kernel is a big part of the problem as I have heard. But there are lots of other reasons I am sure.
Linux shows what amazing things can be done with older, less powerful hardware. And in case no one noticed, hardware isn't getting tremendously more powerful even if various storage capacities are still increasing. (It takes a lot of processing time and power just to move things around in memory now! Adding more memory no longer serves to "speed up" a computer!) Microsoft needs to go back to school and learn to write small, efficient code. This directx approach to speeding things up is far and away the wrong approach.
Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and back Firefox.
Amen! Whenever my boss asks me how long it will take to develop a web page, I first ask him if he wants it to work in IE. If he says yes, I double the time estimate!!!!! So for every hour I spend code JS for FF I spend another hour "fixing" it for IE.
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
HAND.
My PC has a very powerful graphics processor. I'd rather they use that to, you know, render graphics, than waste my CPU doing it much less efficiently. They can also store images and stuff in its memory. As long as it works ok on lower end machines, how is this not a good thing?
Great... Just what we need... Virii infecting our video cards. I can see it now Tech: "I just cant get rid of this thing, every time i reboot it comes back!" Supervisor: "Have you tried replacing the video card?"
Meridian 59. EPIC WIN. http://openmeridian.org
MS stopped IE development after they won the browser war, then Firefox came around and they scrambled to get back on the ball. Today IE is easily 5 years behind every other major browser (FF, Chrome, Safari, even Opera). Worse yet, they are proceeding at a slower pace than their competition. By the time IE developers unfubar their DOM, properly implement CSS 2/HTML4, and speedup their JS engine so that at least it's not dog slow the other browsers will have nailed CSS3/HTML5 and will be working toward in-browser javascript that runs as fast as native code.
Microsoft's worse IE-related nightmare is a hugely popular site which just plain doesn't work on IE. That sort of thing will create a sea-change in browser market share over night. And given the standings of CSS3, javascript performance, and other features like canvas, that day is very likely fast approaching.
The browser that continues to offer ad blocking features is the one I will continue to use, regardless of memory/performance/GUI/etc. issues.
I don't care about bigger, better, faster, more. I care about not being annoyed while browsing the Internet.
Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces.
So TWENTY years after Acorn added anti-aliasing that ran extremely quickly on a 16Mhz RISC computer Microsoft realise that they can do it too, only they require a Direct-X compatible graphics card...
Yay for innovation...
What the hell is with the dude who modded everything in this thread 'troll'?
It's amusingly ironic that your next line states:
I used to metamod like crazy. The new system makes no sense, and I refuse to continue.
So, effectively, you don't like the moderation, but you aren't willing to do anything.
Or does making comments about moderation count as metamoderation now? (And, if so, does making comments about the comments about moderation count as meta-metamoderation?)
(I'd post this under my own name, but I have to be AC or I'll undo my moderation...)
NOT (Better performance != bloated) at least.
The problem is not "better performance" the problem is the means by which Microsoft aims to eke out that "better performance". Some programmers go about that by reducing and/or optimizing the codebase. Microsoft's approach is to consume more system resources, and, frankly, appear to be trying to optimize something that needs no optimization.
And in order to accomplish this, they are proposing to have IE9 use DirectX for rendering, which will make the rendering engine larger and consume more RAM, and at the same time your GPU will be running harder to accomplish better performance on the least bottlenecked portion of page rendering - the screen paint. I can't help wondering - how would something like this run on anything-but-top-end hardware? And what happens if you DON'T have top-end stuff?
If and when 3D web pages (true 3D web pages) come to pass, Microsoft will be ready. I'll grant them that. But adding a GPU interface layer to spiff up the screen fonts seems to be completely not worth the overhead. Microsoft claims to be the only company using the GPU, and that's true, but other browsers don't have a font-rendering problem. So, I think the pertinent question is "why is Microsoft the only company that FEELS THE NEED to engage the GPU to solve this problem?" Others have solved it without resorting to (obligatory car analogy) adding go-fast stripes and a nitrous-oxide kit.
Now, having said that, there ARE substantial improvements claimed in the article, ones that really mean something. Their claims on Javascript, for example, are impressive. Instead of 1/4 the speed of Firefox, they are targeting better than half the speed. We can at least give them the "most improved" tag they really deserve, though they still have substantial catching up to do in that area. But, they are improving things and that's good.
Their Acid3 tests also show significant improvements. They are severely lagging behind the others, but compared to what they have today it's a significant improvement.
There are a LOT of things they have left to do, including true PNG support, that would be a lot more important to many of us than gobbling up GPU resources to solve a problem that doesn't really appear to exist anywhere else. It's innovative, I'll grant them that, and maybe it'll prove to be a good design decision. I remain skeptical at this time.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Maybe we can finally get viruses and malware running on our GPU's to ease the burden.
As a developer of web-based applications, I beg you to quit making new browsers. I am right now dealing with three of your browsers - one a complete nightmare and the others merely "bad". It's really obvious to even the casual observer that your company does not have the capability to make a decent web browser. You'll always be playing a really bad game of catch-up. You'll never be as good as Safari, Firefox, Opera, or Chrome. I can get *all* of those at no charge, same price as yours. But - and this is key here - those browsers work.
I have begun showing my customers just how much money they're paying to make their applications work with IE after I write them. People are getting pissed, and rightly so. You're putting money in my pocket, but frankly I have better, much more fun ways to make money.
Just. Give. It. Up. For the sake of all of us.
Do you have ESP?
Don't worry. I'm gonna guess MS will, as usual, rip off someone elses ideas.
That's right, IE9 Frame, you can replace your Chrome, Firefox, Opera engine with IE9 Frame!!
If you don't install it you are choosing not to be compatible!
They've found that increasing the Minimum System Requirements to Quad-core processors with +10GB of RAM solves the performance problems. =P
(Just for the record I'm not a FF fan)
Accelerate text and graphics performance? My web TEXT was rendering just fine 15 years ago on a 486 running Netscape Navigator. Oh well - I guess that they really do need to close the gap.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
What i'm just wondering about is how it'll affect the power consumption on laptops.
Since currently browsers don't use it, it would be using its lowest powered rendering mode.
Now if you start getting IE to render using 2d acceleration, if the drivers aren't nice, its going to kick in full and start draining a lot more power.
Aero on vista was much the same. Pretty looks, faster power drain.
It'll be interesting to see how it works, if it can be disabled, and if it will drain more power on well written graphic drivers
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
You're wrong. MS was a huge supporter of web standards back in the mid to late nineties, back when they were the underdog browser. They were extremely active in the development of XML, HTML4, DOM, and CSS. They proposed and implemented VML, which was combined with PGML to produce SVG. They were the first to begin implementations of numerous standards, including DOM, CSS and SMIL. That's a big part of why Microsoft won the first browser war; because they had a genuinely superior product to Netscape.
In 1997 Netscape started development on Gecko, in an attempt to leapfrog Microsoft's Trident engine. The problem is that Netscape couldn't get a product to market in a reasonable amount of time. Without a competitor, Microsoft took over the market, peaking at 95% share in 2003. The die was cast in 2000, however, when Microsoft saw that they'd won browser war. That's when they started moving IE into maintenance, and migrating the top developers over to .NET. This left the web stagnating for years with partially implemented standards and no viable competitor to IE.
Fast forward to late 2004, and Mozilla finally had a polished product built on Netscape's Gecko engine. Firefox emerged as a genuinely superior product to IE, and Mozilla relentlessly proclaimed the web standards mantra. They chipped away at Microsoft's market share until Firefox reached around 10% at the end of 2005. Meanwhile, companies like Google provided really compelling services based on the web standards supported by Firefox, and eventually other browsers. And of course, there were all the security fumbles with IE, while the competing browsers were (mostly undeservedly) considered safer. At that point, Microsoft finally got worried and pulled IE out of maintenance in early 2006.
So, now IE is back in active development, and MS is returning to the features they started roughly a decade ago, which places them well behind competitors like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. And Microsoft still doesn't consider IE to be a very important product, because the team today is just a shadow of what they were at their peak in the nineties. That's why the improvements are progressing so slowly, and they're continuing to lag even farther behind the competition. Meanwhile they're hemorrhaging market share at a rate of about 7% per year.
TL;DR: MS cared about standards until they were on top; once they owned the browser market, they did nothing to improve it. Now that they're losing the market, they're making a half-hearted attempt to compete again.
we just care about standards. Implement CSS3 and you're golden.
No need to waste time with a slow IE any more, kidz! With the all-new blazing fast IE9, your computer will be pwned in no time flat! Really!
is an extension framework as powerful as Firefox's one. Microsoft has been improving speed, conformance to standards, and security, to catch up and even surpass in same cases firefox, but it still needs a good variety of plugins to be taken seriously by power users. The ones I'd need to change back to IE are the IE equivalent of adblock and vimperator.
> it seems to me that the actual rendering of the browser window isn't the bottleneck
It really depends. It's a bottleneck for scrolling. It's a bottleneck any time interesting graphical effects (transforms, opacity, svg, etc) are being used. In Gecko's case, it's not uncommon to have the actual painting taking 30+% of the user-perceived time. From my profiling of webkit nightlies, the numbers are similar there. Things are even worse for video (e.g. for full-screen video color-space conversion is one of the main bottlenecks!).
I believe all the browser vendors are looking at making serious use of hardware-accelerated rendering at this point; it's the only way to get acceptable performance on some of the graphical effects people are using more and more.
Couldn't they use their newly open sourced .net platform?
As long as IE has a majority of the market, whatever IE does is the effective web standard, regardless of what any standards body has to say.
(Note, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but I'm pragmatic.)
as in, "The web developer screamed 'IEEEEEEE!' as he lept to his death in frustration." This is known as an injection attack and is becoming increasingly common.
Think global, act loco
You missed the point. IE9 will be so bloated that it has to use graphics hardware acceleration in order to free up CPU resources, and there by yield apparent performance gains. Is it better performing if it takes 3 times the computing resources to match the competition?
Using DirectX means a smaller rendering engine. You already have DirectX installed, and the current engine is duplicating Direct2D and DirectWrite functionality in software.
If you have a GPU, it means a smaller renderer and less CPU usage. It won't make any difference for Intel netbooks, but mine (and most regular laptops) have some kind of NVIDIA or ATI graphics card, which will free up the CPU for other things.
It doesn't need 3D acceleration, but it can use it if you have it. Car analogy: It doesn't need a 350 V8, but IE can use one if you have it.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Wow, you mean they're not going to call it Internet Explorer 2012 and start throwing ribbons at us?
-=JML=-
1. They opened up .NET micro edition, which is aimed at e.g. mobile phone handsets .NET wrappers - look at Managed Direct X
2. Direct X has
What you're saying is akin to "Open GL? Couldn't they use C instead?"
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There is no such thing as a sub-pixel.
If my text is of color X, then you must use all pixel elements in a specific way to render it as such.
Text can therefore only be rendered at a pixel level.
All of the fucking clear type crap just makes text blurry with shitty colored edges. No, I don't want my fucking black text to have red or blue around the edges.
This shit is fucking terrible, and god help you if you rotate your display. IT NEVER FUCKING WORKS.
Or the Mac!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
If you watch this video you will be amazed that IE9 can now do rounded corners. The clueless presenter is completely unaware that Firefox and Webkit have been doing this for years and is "super impressed". It's a bit sad the huge divide that exists now.
If that were the case then why are they NOT going to implement the features in HTML 5 that really make the web perform. You know stuff like WebSockets, full-duplex event / message based communications. Or properly implement globalStorage or applicationCache? From what I can see, they really don't care about the 'web' at all. I think IE 9 is going to be all about Office as a service.
Sounds like a gaming angle, to me.
I could see subscription-based games using this platform - on the quick.
Which is another way of saying that IE9 will be such a resource hog that even the highly advanced eight core systems we'll be using in a few years will not be powerful enough to run it.
That's ok. Microsoft will drop enough features to make its performance passable.
In order to actually compete one must compete against all merits of other software. Microsoft products cost money. Open source products usually do not cost money. Guess who wins! I'll take Firefox even if it becomes slightly slower than Microsoft's offerings. I'll also keep my money in my pocket when i take Firefox.
If the browser will be requiring DirectX for rendering, wont that affect people who run XP/Win7 virtualized to test their apps in different browsers?
I know that some virtualization software packages have limited support for DirectX (VirtualBox, VMWare?) but some don't to my knowledge (Xen, KVM).
I humbly beg you: work together on FF4/IE9 when building your new typography engines. After dealing with IE6 bugs for years, I'm at my end. If the two of you can't agree on a single standard for typography that is free of gotchas I will become a black hat and devote the rest of my days to running botnets who's only purpose is to mock you. Sincerely, Anon.
The JavaScript engine in most browsers doesn't run on the GPU. Unless you're talking about something else. "Performance" is a very nebulous concept. Browsers that are quick at parsing complicated HTML and run JS well can call themselves fast just as browsers that can render complicated graphics (silverlight/flash/canvas) quickly can.
Well, what good is that going to do if my netbook doesn't have a video card?
how many times will it need to suck less before it reaches the non-suckiness of Firefox and Chrome? 42?
IE42, still IE, but doesn't suck this time! Really!
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
No, it's really not.
I don't know if you were going for "funny" or what, but I'd expect any application that does intense page-layout-type work to use the GPU whenever possible, the benefits are enormous.
Comment of the year
Ad.
Block.
Otherwise, GTFO!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
...its name. Internet Exploiter, er I mean Exploder, er I mean Explorer.
They need to change it to something marketroid-based like "Aling". Then everyone who uses their OS's default browser with default settings can be called a "Bing-Aling".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of IE (longtime FF user here). But I have to say that your drawbacks don't seem like terribly big problems for most people.
1) Ok, so don't browse and play a game at the same time. Who does that, anyway?
2) How much more electricity are we really talking here? You could, no doubt, save a lot more energy by doing things like insulating your house, turning down your thermostat, etc; than you could by selecting your browser based on how much electricity it burns. I really can't believe it's significant.
3) This is the same objection as 1), for one thing. And also: what percentage of the time, over the entire user base for IE, is someone going to be watching a video or playing a game at the same time they're actively browsing the web? You yourself don't sound like you do it very often, and I doubt most people do it ever.
I have no idea whether this approach is good or not - but honestly, it's hard to take your objections to it seriously.
If they are truly implementing the DirectX API as they are claiming does this mean maybe someday an update to RDP so that we can view (correctly) DirectX applications across it?
What possibilities does this enable if anything? Will this only allow local calls to the API? So many questions!
I tried to get the word on open standards from MS itself
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/IE-9-Standards-and-Interoperability/
but they wanted me to install some "Silverlight" MS thingy and I gave up.
It doesn't matter if IE9 is able to warp time so the page loads before you finish typing the url and speed up your computer so you could break any encryption scheme. The fact is that large corporations and bureaucracies are not going to upgrade past IE6 until civilization is wiped out. IE9 won't be upgraded to just like IE7 and IE8 haven't been upgraded to and web developers will have to keep building (or at least hacking to get modest functionality) for the lowest common denominator.
"Microsoft ... promising ..."
OK, I've read enough.
If the end-users dont give a shit what hardships you have to go through as a web developers (and to be honest, Firefox, Safari and Opera users dont give a shit about your troubles either), then why the hell should Microsoft?
Make yer shit work. Thats what you are paid to do.
"His name was James Damore."
That is exactly what we are doing! We build the necessary workarounds for the end-users, so that the web pages look the same in every browser. BUT making pages work in IE takes extra effort and time (=money) BECAUSE Microsoft doesn't care about standards. I wouldn't care about IE if it would adhere to the standards like every other browser, but MS are so full of themselves that they ignore standards. THAT is the problem, not lazy web developers.
Yawn..
Opera already have stuff working in this area...
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/index.dml/tag/Opera%203d%20svg%20canvas
Hilarity.
IE 6 was supposed to pick up the speed lag of IE 5.
IE 7 was supposed to pick up the speed lag of IE 6.
IE 8 was supposed to pick up the speed lag of IE 7.
IE 9 is supposed to pick up the speed lag of IE 8.
IE 10 will supposedly pick up the speed lag of IE 9.
Ad Nauseam.
Something about the definition of 'insanity' comes to mind.
OK am I the only one to think of the Apple commercial when reading the headline?
Don't get me wrong, I doubt I will every buy an Apple in the foreseeable future, but they make one heck of a commercial! :)
I think I just like John Hodgman... he funny!
I'm thinking they may be doing this the challenge the other 3d internets...
:-
i.e
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ (google/mozilla)
Seeing as they they still control 90% of the world pc's (when will the people wake up ?) they could easily create a 3d net api that relied on DirectX - locking people into i.e...
Welcome to the 20th Century, Microsoft.
Be more subtle. Write your JavaScript for standards-compliant browsers and use conditional comments to have IE load a static version of the site. Upon entering the site, the user is presented with an unobtrusive info box notifying them that due to the too high cost of supporting both standards compliant browsers and Internet Explorer, IE users get a simpler but completely functioning version of the website.
Don't insult the user, politely inform them that their browser is making it harder and (due to additional work) more expensive to develop good websites and it's recommended (but not ordered!) that they consider one of the free alternatives.
Don't use phrases like "terrible, non-standards-compliant browser"; those read like fanboy speak. Let's see if I can come up with a decent rant...
<div style="border: 2px solid black; background: #ffffdd" id="iesucks">
<a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'" style="float: right; display: inline-block; border: 1px outset; background: #cccccc">X</a>
<b>Some features of this website have been disabled.</b>
<p>You are using Internet Explorer (IE). IE does not follow established internet standards as well as other web browsers, requiring web developers to spend additional effort to specially make sites IE-compatible. This raises the cost of creating good websites and thus lowers the quality of the World Wide Web in general.</p>
<p>Due to the cost of adding special IE support being too high, we have disabled some convenience features of our website for IE users. Don't worry; you can still do everything, it just won't be as pretty.</p>
<p>If you want to make web developers' lifes easier, please consider switching to a different browser. There are various free alternatives for you to choose from, all of which follow the web standards much more closely than Internet Explorer. We recommend <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Mozilla Firefox</a>, although <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome" onclick="window.open('http://www.google.com/chrome', '_blank'); return false;">Google Chrome</a> and <a href="http://www.opera.com/" onclick="window.open('http://www.opera.com/', '_blank'); return false;">Opera</a> are worth a look, as well.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/" onclick="window.open('http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/', '_blank'); return false;">Get Firefox</a> <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('iesucks').style.display = 'none'">Continue using Internet Explorer</a></p>
</div>
This informs people about why not being standards-compliant is terrible and what kind of standards you're talking about. It encourages them to try out Firefox without bossing them around.
If you choose to deploy my rant, you should put all those style attributes into a proper stylesheet and play a bit with the formatting of those last two links. A clean messsage deserves clean code. Also, make sure not to show the box more than once per visitor per day in order no keep obtrusiveness to a minimum.
Be polite, unobtrusive and informative instead of zealous. You wouldn't accept words of wisdom from someone with foam on their mouth. Don't expect your visitors to do so. Deliver the facts, calmly make your point and only suggest to them what you'd like them to do.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Me too. But what does this tell you about the priorities at the IE team when this is something worth bragging about?
I saw a video from PDC (can't find it anymore) and it clearly demonstrated why they are focusing on Direct2D sub-pixel rendering: Performance and visual appearance.
Direct2D is hardware accelerated and offers much higher frame rates (with less CPU utilization) when animating using JavaScript. The sub-pixel rendering proved its worth when animating text that slowly grew bigger. The non-sub-pixel rendering was jittery because the glyphs aligned to full pixels before jumping to the next full pixels. It is hard to explain, but it was very much the same feeling as when someone strikes a wrong chord compared to the smooth Direct2D animation. It was very, very evident.
The future is animations and - if it is not Flash or Silverlight - they will be handled by the browser, possibly in JavaScript. If I get a much smoother "feeling" using browser A compared to a "jittery" experience with browser B, that may influence my choice somewhere down the line (right now my choice is Chrome).
In the same presentation MS also showed graphs from Sunspider benchmark on the early internal IE9 builds - and it actually comes quite close to Chrome (although still last). So they are also working on Javascript performance.
The team *also* showed some telemetry data and statistics from some real-life webpages. On some "javscript heavy" pages JavaScript accounts for a good 30% of the total elapsed time (the rest goes to layout, rendering, network, latency etc.). On other sites the JavaScript share was negligible.
That is why it makes sense to focus on performance in other areas as well. The current "mine is bigger than yours" Sunspider competition is missing the point. It doesn't matter if you have a JavaScript engine that is 2x faster than the nearest competitor if you waste an equal amount of CPU on rendering or layout.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
BUT making pages work in IE takes extra effort and time (=money) BECAUSE Microsoft doesn't care about standards.
You want things easier AND you want to make more money? Well holy fucking shit... thats fucking original.
I don't think that you've thought this through. If you can bang out web pages 50% faster, than so can your competition, and since time is money... guess what... you will still earn the same basic living, but will have to have twice as many clients in order to do so.
Supply and demand, moron.
"His name was James Damore."
No, I don't want extra money. I do the optimizing without requesting extra money. But I would want my extra UNPAID free time back which I need to to optimize for IE. It's not about making money, it's about the stupidity of MS that requires me to invest extra time, which I only need for IE compatibility and not for the other four browsers which by default support the standards brought forward by w3c (because they know what standards are, as previously mentioned).
No, I don't want extra money. I do the optimizing without requesting extra money.
Its already in your wage. Really. If you didn't do this "extra" work as you call it, your clients would dry up or you would have to charge significantly less.. because you would be doing a shitty job.
"His name was James Damore."
Its already in your wage. Really.
It might be, but I have not thought about it consciously.
Anyway - MS can publish its own browser, but I just want them to adhere to standards, like all other browsers do. I'm really not principally against a MS web browser , I'm just against it when companies ignore well established standards.
Thats a different tune from the post of yours that I first responded to.
To be quite frank I am almost certain that the complexity of supporting I.E. is a barrier to entry into your trade, and as such you benefit monetarily by having the expert knowledge required to support all the browsers.
Remember that market prices are what they are for a reason.
"His name was James Damore."
I honestly don't understand why Microsoft continues to dump millions of dollars of development into a product that makes them no money.
If they want to continue IE, then why not just ditch Trident and base it off Webkit like everyone else?
Until I have to buy my grandma a $600 video card just to browse the web!
Let's see - 8 tries - 8 fails, but the 9th is sure to be the one!
I wouldn't use this browser if it was free and came with a $20 bill...but keep trying MS, keep trying.
According to a video from PDC, Microsoft engineers have just spent three weeks with developing IE9 and have already boosted speed, compatibility and rendering quality immensely compared to IE7 and 8.
So... Why didn't they spend those three weeks before actually launching IE7 and 8?