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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....
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 read that as him saying that the Direct2D sub-pixel rendering is more accurate (more aesthetic?) than the current GDI implementation.
But hey, that's a view that's not rabidly anti-Microsoft...
The speed problem with IE is NOT rendering! The issue is with the kludge design for multiple-tabbed browsing - which does the equivalent of starting an entire, new environment and plug-in set, etc for every tab!
This may be the best trade-off for the 3-4 tab user. Beyond this? Awful. More than 10 seconds to switch between tabs, when - as I often do - there are 12 - 20 opened.
Don't talk to me about the brain-dead session @restore@ feature.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
Now that I've calmed down. How come the other browsers don't have to hit the hardware to gain this "performance"?
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.
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."
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?
BTW, why does Explorer (not IE, just basic file list explorer) take up 40 Meg? What on earth is it doing with all that memory just to display a list of files?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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..
'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.
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 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
Looks like you have other issues, because firefox behaves well with memory nowadays. In fact it's been found to be one of the more efficient ones.
...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.
Uh... you're in the wrong place. This is where we bitch about IE, not Firefox.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
Chrome does a much, much better job with memory handling, and Chrome does in fact have addons that are equivalent to NoScript and AdBlockPlus.
Because Explorer.exe handles the entire desktop environment, not just a list of files.
Most Firefox memory issues since 3.x are due to bad extensions, not the core browser. Firefox is doing well with memory nowadays. I've had 2 windows, one of which has anywhere from 2 to 20 tabs in it, running all week on XP SP3, and haven't noticed any slowdowns.
The Irony of you using a memory hungry OS and complaining about an application that diplays MEDIA is clearly lost on you.
Personally I want to access my information as quickly as possible.
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.
> Is this the price you pay for having each tab run in a separate process?
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
For IE to be successful, they need to port it to a proper operating system.
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.
> The issue is with the kludge design for multiple-tabbed browsing - which does the equivalent of starting an entire, new environment and plug-in
You mean like Chrome does? That's the BEST feature of IE8 - no more one-tab crashing taking down all yoru other tabs with more basic browsers like IE7 and Firefox.
The performance really depends on the browser's architecture, which is comprised of a lot of parts and potential bottlenecks.
Chrome and Chromium, for example, are heavily multi-processed and handle large amounts of tabs\plugins very nicely. It certainly doesn't hurt that they were designed from the ground up for this kind of behavior.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
Because Microsoft didn't invent the Internet. As a matter of fact they were very late to the game.
MOSAIC was first, then Mozilla/Netscape. Microsoft realized very late that the Internet was going to be important and threw something together.
The standards had already been well under way by the time Microsoft got into the game.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You're wrong. When web standards started, MS had 0% of the market share. Internet Explorer did not yet exist. The standards were there first; MS decided not to support them.
Subpixel rendering (turning on or off R,G,B elements) is a cool concept. It almost makes me want to give-up my CRT for an LCD. Almost. In reality my eyes can't see those pixels smaller than 1024x800 resolution, so it makes no difference anyway. And I can't believe we're now on IE9. I just upgraded to version 7 last month! Next you're going to tell me XP-SP2 is not the latest OS. ;-)
Aside -
I just tried the K-MELEON web browser for a few weeks. I don't recommend it. Despite claims that it's "ultrafast" it keeps freezing-up for 4-5 seconds while pages are downloading. That's rather frustrating when you're trying to highlight text and the computer does not respond. Firefox or Opera are the best ones (IMHO).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
AdSweep: http://adsweep.org/ AdBlock+: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblock/ FlashBlock: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flashblock/ I actually have been using AdSweep, but I just discovered that there actually is an AdBlock+ for Chrome. I can't seem to find a link for the NoScript equivalent, but I know it's out there. I used to have it. Just use that other Google product to search for it.
Mod me redundant if need be, but I just had to comment that there appears to be a mod troll lurking about, modding non-trolling posts as Troll. Thanks.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Webkit has some leaks too. Not to the extent that Firefox seems to, but they do add up over a few weeks. Chrome may be able to get around this by killing off a process (and releasing leaked memory) when you close a tab so you just have to close tabs instead of the whole browser.
Still, it's an issue that can be improved upon.
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
HAND.
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)
Technically they did what they always do. Microsoft bought out another company's browser (spyglass I think it was) and redbadged as their own.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
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.
Nonsense. Standards bodies can codify existing practice as standards or for reference, but can equally define good practice by creating standards based on some specific, well-defined notions of what "good" is, which more often than not do not match existing practice.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
That depends on the OS.
You do have a point there. But I can count on 1 finger how many OS's Microsoft is targeting with IE.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Chrome doesn't seem to have a problem doing this (on Windows).
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.
Are there particular sites that trigger this? If so, can you please file a bug and cc ":bz" on it?
+1 insightful. I went and looked it up on wikipedia.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994. Microsoft's Internet Exploder was not released until a year later, and then it went hog-wild to ignore the W3C standards. (In fairness, so too did Netscape Navigator with adding new extensions to HTML.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
> 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.
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.)
That they want to make the browser faster, and can do so using D2D over GDI? It seems pretty common to me for a Vista / 7 desktop to have better "gaming graphics" processing than "desktop," if you go by the Windows experience index, or whatever its called.
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
"Next you're going to tell me XP-SP2 is not the latest OS."
Nah after XP there was a huge gap and then Windows 7 came out with NOTHING INBETWEEN.
Microsoft licensed the NCSA/spyglass MOSAIC which was the dominant browser at that time (1993-94).
Then Microsoft got sued for giving-away the browser for free and thus not making royalty payments to NCSA/Spyglass (no sales==no profit sharing). Microsoft used its economic muscle to force Spyglass to accept 8 million dollars in one-time payment, and kept the code for themselves.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. "Business is war." - Jack Tramel
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
>>>Actually, the W3C and IE appeared almost contemporaneously with each other
False. W3C == 1994. IE == 1995. There were standards put forth by the W3C, but both Microsoft and Netscape were ignoring them (and being criticized as well). I remember it well.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Irrelevant.
When we talk about process creation being expensive, as opposed to thread creation, we're usually talking about it taking milliseconds rather than microseconds. From the perspective of the computer, process creation is expensive, and that means we can't use software design which relies on rapidly creating new processes, but if we're talking about the creation of a SINGLE process to service a new tab, it's absofuckinglutely irrelevant. From a user perspective, 1ms might as well be 1us. They both fall into the 'imperceptibly short' bin.
I use Chrome. It's an excellent browser that managed to easily sway me away from Firefox despite the fact that I use some FF extensions on a regular basis.
I have read all about the process per tab design of chrome but I must say that 95% of the times when Chrome crushes, it takes down the whole browser.
I can understand that. Why would business want to deal with the mess that is Vista? Most likely they'll just hop directly to Win 7.
If corporate america was smart they'd also get rid of IE. I just ran Spybot Search & Destroy yesterday. Every piece of malware it found was connected to Internet Explorer. Nothing was tied to Firefox or Opera. IE is like an open door.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
Please, when you get into the multiple seconds range, you are WELL beyond any OS process creation overhead...
No, you didn't say it was unique to a Mac, however, you did say "In Windows, each window is basically a running process.", which isn't correct. It's not even close, almost all applications run multiple windows in a single process on windows.
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.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.