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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."
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....
I read that as him saying that the Direct2D sub-pixel rendering is more accurate (more aesthetic?) than the current GDI implementation.
Me too. But what does this tell you about the priorities at the IE team when this is something worth bragging about?
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..
Is this the price you pay for having each tab run in a separate process? Part of my frustration with firefox is that a crash in one tab brings the whole thing down. I use IE for a handful of sites that won't run in firefox, so I don't have first-hand experience. Is IE 8 able handle crashes in one tab without the rest crashing as well?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I was gonna call bullshit but I opened Chrome here and Firefox with the same pages loaded. Firefox actually used less memory. Now that's not a scientific test or anything but it's enough for me.
I'm gonna mark this day on a calendar because this is fucking incredible.
Chrome does a much, much better job with memory handling, and Chrome does in fact have addons that are equivalent to NoScript and AdBlockPlus.
I agree that Chrome does a better memory handling, but its CPU usage (100% of a dual core) is prohibitive when you are running other applications. This is why I continue to use Firefox.
My problem with Chrome and other webkit browsers in Windows is that their non-javascript rendering is much slower than Opera, FF, and IE. Scrolling a long page in a forum drives me crazy with Chrome/Safari. Opera, surprisingly (to me), won my last rendering comparison by a significant margin, followed by the acceptable FF and IE (well, IE was acceptable in terms of rendering speed, not overall). With an i7 system, 8 gigs of RAM, and a high end gaming video card I shouldn't feel like running webkit is like running Quake at 1280x1024 on my 486 without a 3d accelerator. However, I recognize that I'm a lot more sensitive to that sort of performance issue than are most.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Actually, the W3C and IE appeared almost contemporeously with each other, so there wasn't much in the way of actual web (as opposed to network) standardisation at the time. In fact, the W3C was created to combat the existing standards-free mess. Microsoft's disregard for the growing standardisation of the web over the coming years was a serious issue, and a disincentive for other browsers to standardise, but it's not like they blundered into a divine and well-defined web and made a mess of it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The W3C was almost irrelevant in the period when Netscape was the dominant browser. Netscape did whatever the hell it wanted (tables, frames), and the W3C was constantly playing catchup with them.
The major break was when Netscape pushed "JavaScript Style Sheets" over CSS and "Layers" over the W3C DOM.
Internet Explorer 4 contained preliminary versions of the W3C CSS and DOM standards. Yes they were incomplete and buggy and extended, but without them the W3C probably would have faded away completely.
When Mozilla came out, it was far more compatible with IE than it was with previous versions of Netscape.
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