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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.
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
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
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.
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.
Yeah I was thinking pretty much the same thing, but this is another article for a difference crowd with its own purpose. And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the /. torture rack.
Even during the previous article's discussion, a question on my mind (that I was afraid would have been modded offtopic) was "how faithful will their implementaiton of SVG be?" Microsoft is quite famous for doing things in such a way that it makes the world believe everyone else is broken. So now I am left to wonder about this too.
C'on guys, you're way behind. Just like it took you ages to report IE supported HTML. Oh wait....
I've tested with an application that I'm developing that generates complex SVG network maps (that validate as SVG 1.1 with the W3C validator with no errors).
Linear gradients don't work at all, stroke and fill colors appear to be sporadic. JavaScript doesn't work (but I didn't expect it to as it's targeted to Chrome and Safari primarily right now).
I expect that MS will add more functionality as the preview progresses. They have a lot of work to do, regardless.
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?
Shouldn't the headline read "Microsoft embraces SVG for Internet Exploder 9?"
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Why else ? "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is the Microsoft motto when it comes to competing standards.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
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.
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.
Yes, the SVG support in the Platform Preview is definitely a work in progress; it really should be viewed as an early alpha in overall completeness and quality. However, MS has apparently committed to a full and proper SVG implementation in IE9. Some links worth checking out:
Platform Preview gives Web developers first taste of IE9 - Scroll down to SVG heading for a nice summary
SVG in IE9 Roadmap - Official IE blog post on SVG
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
And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the /. torture rack.
Not necessary - here is a nice comparision for all current browser implementations of SVG and how much tests of the official SVG test suite they pass : SVG Implementation Table. If you click on the chart you get a very detailed view.
To summarize:
IE9: 29% of the SVG test cases,
Firefox: 72%,
Chrome/Safari: 83
Opera: 93%
IE9 is way behind, Opera is the winner in this test
I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
Silverlight was not released just to watch movies and animations. Just because that's what Flash has devolved into over the years, doesn't mean that that's what Microsoft(or anyone else) wants to do with Silverlight(or JavaFX if it still exists).
Silverlight is aimed at creating Rich Internet Applications. It's more of an alternative to AJAX than to Flash because, while Flash can be used to create RIAs, no one does.
Unfortunately, the demo RIA for everyone of these platforms is a video player, mostly because it's dead simple, looks flashy and is something you can't do in Javascript, so everyone forgets that.
I really don't think that HTML5 and/or SVG taking over the animation or video playing market share is going to make any dent in Silverlight, because that's not what it was designed for.
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
Whenever anyone runs objective tests of browser functionality, Opera usually does very well. I'm amazed it doesn't have more market share.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
C-A-N-V-A-S.
Thanks.
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.
Next: Step two: Extend.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.