Microsoft Previews IE9 — HTML5, SVG, Fast JS

suraj.sun sends this excerpt from CNET on Microsoft's preview of IE9 in Las Vegas just now. "At its Mix 10 conference Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now. Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware. One big change in the JavaScript engine Hachamovitch is proud of is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer's processor." Microsoft didn't say what codec they were using for the HTML5 video demo, but the Technologizer says it's H.264.

Comments

firefox is getting old

[sopssa]

It seems that even IE beat Firefox in Javascript performance now. Firefox sure has been slacking recently. There's still road ahead though, Chrome and Opera are leading.

Re:firefox is getting old

[shutdown -p now]

But the question remains, how tight will it be to the OS? Would a simple security flaw give a bit of JS access to the kernel?

This kind of thing isn't possible on NT family operating systems since inception. IE does not run in the kernel, and never did.

Of course, it is possible to have a remote code execution vulnerability in JS engine, combined with a local elevation exploit, giving one root access - and from there patching OS files to get kernel access - but that is something that is possible on any OS, and not something you can fully mitigate by sandboxing (since sandbox can have its own vulnerabilities).

Or are they going to significantly sandbox the JS, and try to do everything right (as opposed to just the rendering)

IE has been sandboxing browser engine (including JS) to run in reduced elevation mode (so that it doesn't even have the privileges of user who runs the browser - so it can't access the files of that user, for example) since IE7/Vista.

Re:H.264

[sopssa]

Once free and open Internet? What is Flash then? It's both proprietary closed platform and H.264.

It's of course H.264 but for different reasons - Windows 7 has build-in support for H.264, and Theora kind of lost the war already.

Re:Nice try with ACID3, Microsoft

[Colonel Korn]

No, you've missed my point: They're excusing something that's part of the test. Nowhere else do they explain away the current score or what's missing. The text on the page seems to give the impression the pause is acceptable or 'as intended'. But it's not - it has failed ACID.

They don't claim it passed ACID3. In fact, after continuing from 39, it never gets past 55. Read the IE9 arstechnica article from a few hours ago to see their comments on ACID3, mainly that they don't put any priority on passing it but that their score is going up as they improve their standards compliance.

Re:Nice try with ACID3, Microsoft

[twidarkling]

It's scoring a 55. That's a fail no matter what. You're latching on to the wrong point. The important part, which you've glossed over so neatly, is that Microsoft included that 55/100 on ACID3 as part of the actual news. They're freely admitting upfront, "hey, on this test, we're still doing badly, but we are working on improving. It's just not our focus."

Re:Uphill Battle

[pandrijeczko]

You replaced MS Office and Photoshop with OpenOffice and GIMP? Are you out of your mind?

In the cases where people are using dodgy license keys of the above, then yes - the number of trojans and back doors I've found on those PCs definitely relates to the amount of hooky keygens I've also found on them. So for those people who never paid for it in the first place, the Free Software is a better alternative.

I am not for one minute denying that there people out there into VB and complex document macros, or into professional photo editing, who definitely need MS Office or Photoshop to do what they do.

But for 95% of people, including myself, a computer expert for more than a quarter of a century who just does the occasional simple document or a quick tweak to some photos he's taken, MS Office and GIMP do more than enough.

OpenOffice in no way compares to MS Office, although there are actually some people who would argue that. Your relatives are not those people.

Then I would say you've not tried OpenOffice recently because I've found it has a very high degree of compatibility. I've been testing it with a lot of my work documents and whilst the standard at work is MS Office 2003 only, I've not found any real incompatibility issues - but again, I don't get involved with documents that have much in the way of VB macros in them.

Re:MS stole stuff in the past. now its easy to do

[idontgno]

What happens if they cut-and-paste OS into their commercial products?

They get busted and have to release their formerly closed source product into OS.

Problem solved.

MS is visibly arrogant and arguably evil, but stupid? Nyet. Count on their legal eagles making DAMN sure the little fiasco outlined in the linked article never happens again. They may be inclined to do anything they think they can get away with, but this is something they understand they can't get away with.

No, PNG was primarily created to be patent-free

[dwheeler]

No, not even slightly true. The primary reason that PNG was created was to create a patent-free format. Then, since they were creating a format anyway, they decided to make other improvements. For more information, see "History of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Format" by Greg Roelofs, which was published by the Linux Gazette and later the Linux Journal. I know, this is Slashdot, I'm not allowed to cite sources :-).

Re:H.264

[sopssa]

And some early version of IE (5 maybe?) showed PNG colors slightly incorrectly and with no transparency support, making it pretty much unusable. I still have nightmares about those slightly incorrect colors and keep thinking I should use GIF/JPG instead of PNG.

Re:Slew of recent marketting...

[RAMMS EIN]

From the very beginning, in fact. Microsoft got started by Gates and Allen saying that they were working on a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, when, in fact, they neither had the hardware nor were writing code for it. That is to say, Microsoft made vaporware even before it was founded.