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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.
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.
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.
Why is the real/normal world so much smaller than the MS world?
-]Phreak Out[-
Now that I've calmed down. How come the other browsers don't have to hit the hardware to gain this "performance"?
'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
...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.
The standards were an attempt to provide a clear sensible path going forward, not to codify the garbage as it was.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
So better code means less users?
I think it's more because people just don't care.
-]Phreak Out[-
Because the real world is a line from (-INF,0) to (+INF,0). The imaginary world is the entire complex plane EXCEPT that line where y=0i.
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.
Codifying existing practice (garbage or otherwise) is what standard bodies are supposed to do. In the case of web standards they didn't follow that rule which is why we have this mess.
It's okay to break the rules ("Don't touch the hardware; that's reserved for drivers only") when you're Microsoft and trying to stop your dwindling browser share (95%...90%...80%...70%....65%).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Why do people realise how stupid benchmarks are, yet parrot on about ACID all day?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
HAND.
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?
They're going to be using DirectX.
Even if web standards came along later, it still wouldn't be a good reason to ignore them. The standard electrical outlet was designed after someone discovered how to harness electricity, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them.
Standards are good. If someone wants to argue that IE's version of HTML is better than W3C's and we should be using it as our standard instead, I'm all ears. Of course, for that to be a reasonable idea, we'd have to have a well documented explanation of what IE's "standard" is and how it works, because otherwise it's not much of a standard.
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.)
Which btw were never standards to begin with
Standards are written documents that provide sufficient information to allow everyone to build products that meet them.
Snipe around the edges all you want, that's what standards are.
Marketers hate that world. They want "standard" to mean "whatever gets me money", same as they want for every other word connoting anything good.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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).