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Microsoft Adopts SVG For Internet Explorer 9
An anonymous reader writes "SVG has been a published standard for almost a decade. Microsoft has had nothing to do with it, even while every other major browser adopted SVG as a supported format and interface. Just in the last few weeks, though, Microsoft has thrown a surprising amount of its weight behind SVG." This means for IE 9, but it's a start.
It's just more mulling over the recently released IE9 preview, which went through the /. torture rack pretty much as soon as it was announced. SVG support was already there, and was discussed alongside all the other newly supported standards, so what's the point of TFS?
I commend the decision, but I don't trust them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
this follows on the earlier announcement to support more HTML5 features on IE9. after killing netscape, IE has managed to thwart other upcoming browsers by tweaking standards in a way that developers specifically for IE and other standard compatible browser's rendering looked bad. now this was a fine business strategy except that the browser just refused to evolve. firefox happened followed by safari, chrome, etc. heck, even opera is getting more attention now, especially with euro mandated browser raffle for windows. now IE strategy of not following standards is stacking up against it, with some markets have IE share dropped to less that 50. it is trying to catch up now and actually have the audacity to suggest that they are doing a better job of following the standards, a case in point the adoption of long desired css border-radius. anyway, developers are 1 step closer to worry less about cross browser compatibility (cbc) and more about design and development
Agreed. The new browser probably won't run on XP such that people will be forced to buy Windows 7 to run MS's newer browser.
Table-ized A.I.
So much fucking FUD, people.
Windows XP (Server 2003/R2 is still mainstream, but they won't port IE9 to it becaus of the same reasons like they did with 2000 and IE 7), is in extended support, which means no more new features, just security updates until 2014.
Now, if you'd like those features, Microsoft has a program in which you pay the devs extra to port it to (insert older Windows OS here).
IE 9 will run on Vista and 7.
Agreed. The new browser probably won't run on XP such that people will be forced to buy Windows 7 to run MS's newer browser.
And you think this is a BAD thing? So Mr. Linux what version of the kernel are you running? 1.0? Which dist, Ubuntu 1.0? I bet your Linux install isn't a 10 year old operating system, nor would you even consider running or supporting one that is that old. So why should Microsoft? XP was written a very long time ago before any of this intertubes stuff ever was even popular. The sooner MS can kill it off, the better the entire planet will be. The only thing that MS should kill off sooner is IE6.
Oh my god, they're not giving 100% support to an OS that's almost 9 years old?!? Burn them at the stake!!!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I guess they now want to change the standard to accommodate their bugs.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Browsing is also mobile browsing nowadays. Microsoft has not the capability any more to impose technologies (Silverlight etc.) on users any more. If 50% of the devices dont support your webpage and never will, you can not ignore any mor anybody who can not install some plugin. Morover IE is also loosing foothold on the desktop. So what was a move to hinder a competitor seriously (Why should i embed SVG on webpage if IE can not view it?) is slowly becoming a disadvantage. If Firefox and google chrome get the image of "just working fine" when compared to the IE and IE gets the image of causing problems, then they can stop making IE9.
Every time somone mentiones this I go to adobe and try the svg test... and I can't se anything except "Missing Plugin".
What's the trick ???
There appears to be an inverse relationship between IE market share and its implementation of standards. Applaud MS for good decisions, but never forget how they acted when they owned the market.
Earth hour? Useless! This day shall be known as IE HOUR! Everybody starts their IE's around UTC+0 12:00!
On a more serious note, why don't they do these real improvements in small increments, so that these would appear to IE8 too, but faster.
To get the plugin?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
C'on guys, you're way behind. Just like it took you ages to report IE supported HTML. Oh wait....
At this rate, IE 14 might actually be worth using!
because they probably just now noticed it existed.
Just kidding, but Microsoft has been pretty insular... it seems most of the time they would rather contemplate their own navel than check to see what anybody else is doing.
1) There is not, and never has been, an Ubuntu version 1.0.
2) I don't know how old you are. If you are old enough, you may recall a period in human (and computing) history referred to as "the Nineties." It was a rough-and-tumble era in which browsers fought and bled and died, when this whole newfangled "dot com" thing happened and people all around the globe started using all kinds of intertubes-type stuff. Windows XP, by the way, was not around back then.
Granted, it was not discovered that the Internet was, in fact, a series of tubes until the eminent Ted Stevens presented his groundbreaking research in the mid-2000s, but the tubes were already in heavy operation by then.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
So Mr. Linux what version of the kernel are you running?
And which version of windows are majority of users running? If most Linux users would use kernel 2.4 and FF would only support 2.6, you think it would be taken lightly?
They do try, bless their little cotton socks. :
Oh my god, it's like the time they refused to give us 32 bit IE for NT 3.51. We had tu run the crappy 16 bit version. We eventually upgrade to 4, but ran Netscape in the meantime.
Somehow, I think all of the big businesses locked into IE6 won't care.
Shouldn't the headline read "Microsoft embraces SVG for Internet Exploder 9?"
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
it's their only business model... SVG is the new target to pervert. Expect their web development tools to produce subtly broken SVG that only renders correctly on the IE version... they did the exact same with html. They will go to great lengths to ensure their development tools produce websites that don't work right on other browsers. Ever such subtle glitches, but the users will end up blaming the other browser that they picked on the ballot page.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This was announced on the 16th of March:
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02
1) There is not, and never has been, an Ubuntu version 1.0.
Duck! *Wooooosh*
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
Call me a suspicious paranoid old bugger, but if you been buggered by someone decades, you tend to grow a bit cautious.
The more I read about IE9, the more I wonder "what's the catch". Because MS finally getting it and playing nice just doesn't seem to be an option.
And low and behold. No IE9 for XP, despite it still being sold by MS and still being widely used. The excuse: "we can't because we are only a multi-billion dollar company and can't afford to hire the very best and just make it work".
An MS apologists commented on the last article that it was impossible to run IE9 under XP because of the hardware rendering... clearly he doesn't know that A: DirectX entire point was to abstract hardware to the point it also (used to) support it purely running in software mode" and B: That all the other browsers have no such problem.
No, I see MS making the same mistake they made countless time before. Not killing of their old crap. Learn to clean up after yourself. You dumped IE6-7-8 on the world, now get rid of them.
It would be doable for MS, and they are not. Why? Because they are still the same old "can't do" company. MS apologists and the naive jumped in Windows Mobile 7 to, and then finally it was announced, no multi-tasking and no copy&past... so it was just like all the releases before, fundemental things that WERE PROMISED, not making it into the release.
So, I am going to see what MS finally delivers. Their promises have no value.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Problem with that little theory is that the "pull" is stronger in the other direction. If you're running XP and IE8, and you need SVG, instead of paying $100 to upgrade to IE9, you'll just download FF or Chrome and Microsoft loses more browser share.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
You run into problems here if the systems you have to support are 15 to 25 years old though, and the software to support them does not run under anything newer than Windows XP. And telling the customer he has to rip out his whole infrastructure and replace it by something new (and to pay for it) gets ugly very fast.
We still keep some Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 boxes around for those tasks though.
Flash has opposition now from two technologies, one is SVG and the other is Silverlight. The timing is very logical since Apple doesn't support flash on it's IPhone and Ipad. Microsoft first has to remove Flash from it's dominant position. If that plan would work out in the future Microsoft can always choose to drop SVG support and pushing forward it's Silverlight.
I fixed it for you. This is /. after all:
The sooner MS can kill it self off, the better the entire planet will be.
Or perhaps Fuzzybunn?
Ezekiel 23:20
"So the next time you see a well-thought-out, reasonable-sounding response to an obviously-trollish comment on Slashdot remember: IT COULD BE AN ASTROTURFER'
Sounds sweet. Can we have some of those?
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
It's a lot more common than you think.
Visual Basic has morphed into so many incompatible things over the years that a few places keep Win98 machines with a specific version of VB just to run a single undocumented app put together by a guy with a few dozen papers to his name too busy running a company or University department to update it.
The oddest thing I've got like that (apart from the scientific single purpose VB apps) is a plot server for a specific type of vector graphics running on a SparcStation 5 that is faster and produces better results than a more recent implementation running on modern hardware. I've got more recent sparc hardware that it can run on with just a change of hostname but there has been no need yet.
I thought we'd addressed this point? The question is not when was XP released, it was when did they stop shipping it. They were selling it concurrently with Vista for netbooks and you can still buy machines from companies like Dell with XP preinstalled, and checking it seems that they are still licensing XP for ULCPCs until October 22, 2010.
A typical Linux user would probably be quite upset if his distribution started including software that didn't run on a version of Linux that they were shipping. A Mac user would be upset if Apple released some software that didn't work on a version of OS X that Apple was currently shipping. A Windows user, who is using the operating system with 58.4% of the market share, is expected to be happy that the company that produced it is doesn't allow them to run their latest software because the operating system is almost a decade old.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Try this page: SVG WOW
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The trick is to visit a site that uses SVG correctly, instead of invoking the plugin explicitly. Try something like one of the w3schools examples or others.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Imagine all those gradients and rounded corners - how they wasted so much pre-video bandwidth. Imagine the speed at which those pages could've loaded over a 56 kbps connection. All because Microsoft had monopoly on de-facto "standards" and is abusing it. Well we don't need you anymore, dying old browser.
Dude, you must be new here. You could have summed that up with the cliche "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and have been moderated to 5 already. Here, watch:
:)
Microsoft is clearly trying their tactic of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish using SVG.
There.
Now, just kick back and watch the moderation roll in
moox. for a new generation.
If you look at Haavard's blog on the Opera site, you will find a reference to run of the SVG 1.1 Test Suite on IE9. In contrast to Microsoft's SVG test suite (of about 104 individual tests in 7 areas), the W3C's test suite has 275 tests, each of which typically has a dozen or so subtests. On the standard test, IE9 passed 28.36 % of the tests. All other browsers are above 60%. Once SVG becomes viable, I expect that all of the other browsers will quickly advance into the 90%+ range. Opera is already well above 90%. So I welcome IE9 into the SVG crowd, but they are far behind the competition.
A skeptic, that is to say, anyone who can recall Microsoft's behavior over the past 20 years, might wonder if Microsoft ran the official SVG test suite on all competing browsers to find areas where they failed. They then built a second test where they know the others will fail. The developers then focused on implementing them correctly in IE9. This would give them bragging rights when they ran their specially crafted SVG test that focussed on these areas. But it would not help improve interoperability if they grade themselves on a new test, rather than the W2C test suite. I hope I a wrong, but like the little boy who cried wolf, Microsoft has a history of misleading the community.
Think global, act loco
Your browser might be picking the wrong mime type for SVG. I can't find the details, but I recall that an early Adobe tool established 'image/svg-xml' in the windows registry, and firefox will inherit that; changing it to 'image/svg+xml' should fix things (I suppose installing a later version of the Adobe SVG plugin should also do that, who knows).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Microsoft is putting their customers at risk every time they half ass these standards like they love to do. Companies spend a lot of time and money to develop these lovely web apps that only work for IE version X, then find out that because IE X+1 is trying to finally conform to standards their current app is broken. Whether we like to admit it or not, IE is getting better at security issues, but many of their customers can't upgrade b/c they built the POS that is IE 6. I have seen this again and again in organizations. No one wants to upgrade because application Y breaks when you upgrade so everyone stays with the more vulnerable IE 6. Microsoft needs to stop putting it's customers at rish in the name of vendor lock in.
Actually it's as simple as GPU support, XP doesn't have it, Vista and 7 do. I reckon you could make the likes of Opera and Firefox a lot more streamlined if they dumped support for (GPU-less) OS's.
I think you mean champing at the bit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_%28horse%29#In_popular_culture for more detail on that.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
And that page shows why Flash is so great. Watch the CPU usage meter as the demos play.
True enough, you would think.
I needed the plugin because certain aspects of SVG weren't fully supported (such as the inclusing of text), at least in FF3.5.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
C-A-N-V-A-S.
Thanks.
If most Linux users would use kernel 2.4 and FF would only support 2.6, you think it would be taken lightly?
On Slashdot? Yes. It would be praised. One guy'd even get a +5 post explaining how it shows the benefits of Open Source.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Never heard of DirectX, did you? XP doesn't have Windows Presentation Foundation (which uses DirectX for acceleration btw), but this is hardly the same as not having GPU support.
I'm fairly sure MS made the conscious decision to build IE9 on top of this new framework so it wouldn't be compatible with XP.
Understandably, because why would people upgrade to Vista/Win7 when they can get all the goodies for naught?
If they only wanted to do hardware acceleration, that was already possible with Windows 95 SR2 and DirectX 1.
[...] probably [...]
So much fucking FUD, people.
That's not FUD, it's a realistic worldview. Whenever MS can do something to force people to upgrade, or buy an 'Ultimate' edition, they do.
For instance, instead of fixing Vista they released Windows 7, merely proving that if you bought Vista you're fucked. Similarly, hackers have proven time and again that these "can't be backported" issues are a total lie when they accomplish what MS itself "can't".
It's just good healthy skepticism about the claims of a known liar.
Next: Step two: Extend.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's had 3 service packs. By your standard, Linux is about 20 years old and should therefor be tossed.
Table-ized A.I.
No great OS would be able to get a monopoly-like adoption on even PC desktops. The reason is that users have disparate needs, and only lock-in can make they agree on a pltaform. A great OS has no lock-in, by definition.
See how many different distros are used just on the ninche ocupied by Linux. One company would never be able to do all those tasks equaly well.
Rethinking email
Plus Mozilla doesn't also own Linux and isn't trying to get you to shell out another $100 for the latest and greatest Linux.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, 2.6.0 came out December of 2003. So only 7 years. And if by "Linux" you probably mean "J Random GNU/Linux Distribution," Ubuntu releases every 6 months, etc...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Some markets? Their worldwide browser share has plummeted to around 54%. http://gs.statcounter.com/ I assume strongholds like Korea are IE for character set reasons, but they'll be less than 50% worldwide in just a few more months. The web stagnated for 10 years because of MS. Now that they're losing their grip, they're back to play embrace, extend, extinguish once again. This time they're not going to be able to crush some little one product company like Netscape though. They're up against Google and Apple. I hope those two stomp a mudhole in MS once and for all.
Any relation to Marcel?
What are you babbling about. IT IS A BROWSER. Other browsers can support standards on XP, so why can't they? Opera/Firefox/Chome do it on various OS'es at the same time. So why can't MS?
Well maybe you should be paying attention to technology a bit more instead of ranting about crap you have no idea about.
IE9 uses an internal GPU assisted framework and GPU assitsted composer. This is why IE9 can animate complex SVG and HTML5 content on pages that make OTHER BROWSERS choke.
Since IE9 depends on the GPU 'assistance' it uses the framework and driver models of Vista and Win7 that allo the OS to share system RAM with the VRAM and gives the OS control over the 'scheduling' of the GPU.
These things do not exist on XP.
These are also not things other browsers do, and if the other browsers don't get their crap together and up the performance of dynamic graphical content as one example, HTML5 will be either a BUST or were the world moves back to IE9 as it is the ONLY BROWSER that is fast enough to render this rich content.
Think of it like this IE9 is treating the web like Vista treats XAML, and is accelerating the crap out of it, and YES it does need the Vista WDDM concepts or the GPU would tied to one process or choke when left to yeilding multi-tasking GPU concepts like OpenGL uses.
(See in Vista, with the WDDM, the OS pre-emptively multi-tasks the GPU and gets the final say on the GPU and the scheduling, thus allowing it to flip out threads doing some computation (see DX10) and threads to one application needing rendering, etc.
Somehow the advantages of the WDDM concepts went over most people's heads and apparently even when used in proof of concept in Win7 and newer applications like IE9, people still don't get what this new model gave Windows that DOES NOT EXIST ON ANY OTHER OS PLATFORM.)
Make sense yet or should we get a Windows for Dummies book in here for you?
DirectX is software acceleration, GPU is hardware and does a much better job, it's why everyone is installing them in practically everything.
I don't know what you're smoking, but DirectX (or more precise its Direct3D component) is an API/library that exposes your GPU functionality to applications. Sure it can emulate some features in software if needed, but it is built to use hardware acceleration as much as possible. Using software to access/use the hardware acceleration of your GPU is not the same as software acceleration. That term is even meaningless, unless you mean using SIMD instructions on your main processor to accelerate things that would be slower using the normal instruction set.
Your statement was that XP doesn't have GPU support, which is plainly false, as even the later versions of Win95 supported direct access to GPU registers through DirectX (hence the name). The fact that some people may or may not have a GPU for their XP machine doesn't change the fact that you can use the GPU on an XP machine if there is one. Also, Vista doesn't require a GPU present to run. And when you play 3D games on Vista or Win7 they still use DirectX.
So get your facts straight.