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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."
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?
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.
Because it's more efficiently coded.
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.
So buy a snow leopard instead....
So better code means less users?
I think it's more because people just don't care.
-]Phreak Out[-
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.
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
HAND.
"Acid3 is the third in a series of test pages written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.
Acid3 is primarily testing specifications for “Web 2.0 dynamic Web applications. Also there
are some visual rendering tests, including webfonts. Here is the list of specifications tested:
Here's to the crazy ones
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.
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
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.