IE 9 Beta Strips Down For Speed

CWmike writes "Those who have written off IE as being slow and old-looking are in for a surprise. The just-released Internet Explorer 9 beta is dramatically faster than its predecessor, sports an elegant, stripped-down interface and adds some useful new features, writes Preston Gralla. Even more surprising than the stripped-down interface is IE9 beta's speed. Internet Explorer has long been the slowest browser by a wide margin. IE9 has turned that around in dramatic fashion, using hardware acceleration and a new JavaScript engine it calls Chakra, which compiles scripts in the background and uses multiple processor cores. In this beta, my tests show it overtaking Firefox for speed, and putting up a respectable showing against Safari, Opera and Chrome. It's even integrated into Windows 7. One big problem: It will not work on Windows XP. So, forget the performance and security boost, many enterprises and netbook users."

Comments

I know other whores...

[dotancohen]

...who strip down for speed, dope, blow, and whatnot.

I don't go near any of them, either.

Re:I know other whores...

[hedwards]

They give you viruses as well if you're not careful.

Re:I know other whores...

[ErroneousBee]

Yeah, but are they continuously compiling themselves in the background in an attempt to make themselves look better at the expense of every other thing the user might want to be doing?

I haven't really got the hang of this whole whore metaphor thing have I?

Re:I know other whores...

[Joce640k]

I dunno, I think you nailed it.

(And the answer is "yes"...)

Re:I know other whores...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but are they continuously compiling themselves in the background in an attempt to make themselves look better at the expense of every other thing the user might want to be doing?

I haven't really got the hang of this whole whore metaphor thing have I?

To borrow a maxim from the working world: If you don't appearing to be working, you're wasting company time.

Next thing you know, someone will be working on cloud-rendered javascript.

Re:I know other whores...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, somebody has mod points and is too damned lazy to read the mod guidelines.

Re:I know other whores...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad. /. seems on a tear. You've got browsers stripping down stories right after a pedobear alert.

What a grand site this is.

Re:I know other whores...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares! You also get a free naked picture of Bill Gates with every download!

Re:I know other whores...

[mwvdlee]

IE is not a whore; whores don't crash in your home.

Heyyy!

[Anonymous Coward]

This story title just made me think of an awesome new mascot for IE9 that would make me want to use it...

Re:Heyyy!

[Anonymous Coward]

PEDOBEAR Approves!

No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Microsoft, but it isn't 1997 any more. These days many companies use Macs and a good number even use Linux. No basic cross platform support for the myriad of platforms means that IE9 will be behind Firefox and Chrome right out of the gate.

Re:No cross platform support either

[mark72005]

Not supporting Macs or Linux shuts out, what - about 2% of IE's potential market...?

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

But... but cross-platform coding reduces performance and increases bugs! Microsoft said it, so it must be true!

Re:No cross platform support either

[dotancohen]

That is because IE is a vehicle to get people INTO the latest Windows, not a tool for Windows users to use. There will be XP lusers who will see this as the reason to upgrade to W7, and there will be Macunts/Ubuntards who will now perceive IE as "safe" enough to go back to Windows.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think any sane person would expect an IE on Linux or Mac (not since 5.01 anyway); but the XP omission sucks.

Re:No cross platform support either

[pthisis]

Closer to 10%.

Most estimates put Linux at around 1.5% of the web browser market (about 1.2% traditional and 0.3% Android usage), traditional Macs at around 6%, and iPhone/iPad/iTouch around 1%.

Windows (aggregated) is about 89% of the web browser market, with the difference being mostly other handheld/phone devices (Symbian and Blackberry being the next largest blocks after those mentioned).

That's just the straight usage numbers--it establishes an upper bound on your market. If you don't run on Linux/MacOs, you can't get that 8.5% of the market at all. Real-world factors push the exclusion higher (e.g. corporations that mostly run Windows, but only want to support one browser across all desktops and hence are limited to thinking about Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or some other non-IE browser).

Re:No cross platform support either

[GooberToo]

I recently read an article, which I can't seem to find, which purports Linux accounts for roughly 10% of desktops. I find this to be far more likely than the often quoted 2%. People forget that desktop doesn't always translate into web browser. And given the frequent niches Linux fills, its far more likely for a Linux desktop to exist which is never accounted for by web statistics.

Realistically, due to Linux's nature, we have absolutely no idea how many Linux desktops there really are. And likely, anyone who says they have a precise number is selling statistics. The only thing I am sure of, the desktop counts for Linux are extremely likely to be far larger than the often quoted 2%.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think a Linux (or Mac) user would touch this with a 10 foot pole even if it was available?

Re:No cross platform support either

[mark72005]

Most corporations only want one OS across all desktops, so it's more likely that these corporations will just put off making any browser change until they do their next Windows upgrade.

The one I work for is still on XP/IE6 - simply because the expense/work around an upgrade of either isn't worth it.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

What do Linux desktops that aren't using a web browser have anything to do with Internet Explorer's potential market?

Re:No cross platform support either

[mark72005]

I guess I find it hard to believe that 1 person in 10 who carries a laptop out of Big Box Retailer is going to install Linux and leave it on.

On slashdot a comment like this gets modded down, because of humans' tendency to assume everyone is similar to them instead of seeing themselves as an outlier.

But I think 2% is accurate, maybe even a little high, in terms of consumer desktop OSes

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

This is incredibly annoying. I'm actually going to have to pirate windows 7, and run it in a VM for the sole purpose of testing websites out.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

I recently read an article, which I can't seem to find, which purports Linux accounts for roughly 10% of desktops. I find this to be far more likely than the often quoted 2%.

Why do you find it far more likely? Because it fits in with your biases?

And given the frequent niches Linux fills, its far more likely for a Linux desktop to exist which is never accounted for by web statistics.

And yet the same people who whine about those web statistics when it comes to OS marketshare have no problem using them (even from the same source as the OS market share figures they rail against) to show how IE is dying and how Firefox and Chrome are stealing its marketshare.

Re:No cross platform support either

[hedwards]

Performance wise it really depends, between OSes on the same architecture, not likely, between different architectures, almost certainly.

To be fair, the last time they did anything like that it was between X86, Alpha and PowerPC.

Re:No cross platform support either

[dsavi]

Uhh, that about Mac and Ubuntu users moving back to Windows because of IE...

Could you be more wrong?

Re:No cross platform support either

[GooberToo]

Oddly enough, someone in this same thread made reference to that same 10%. Even 10% still qualifies it as a fringe so this isn't exactly an ego driven position.

All I know is, everywhere I go I constantly see desktop adoption rates much higher than 2%. Sure that's anecdotal but anecdotally, its seems to consistently correspond with that 10%. Think about it. At 2%, you would almost never see Linux on desktops and yet I commonly see it. Realistically, the 2% number is a complete guess and yet everyone throws it around as if its fact. Its hardly a reach to presume someone's guess is a bit on the low side. To say the accurate number is somewhere between 2% and 10% is extremely likely where the truth exists.

Now if we're talking Linux desktops which game companies might care about, it probably is closer to 2%, or less.

Re:No cross platform support either

[doti]

I work for a *huge* corporation.
R&D runs mostly Linux, along with some SunOS; while the rest runs mostly Windows.

The "official" supported browser is Firefox, and the office suit is OpenOffice.

Re:No cross platform support either

[dsavi]

Wait- I stand corrected- You could be.

Mac and Ubuntu users moving back to Windows because of an updated Blue Screen of Death.

Re:No cross platform support either

[natehoy]

I'm not disputing your 2% number, because I don't have any other numbers to dispute it with. But not all computers are new computers.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I personally know of a handful computers that are running Linux. They probably did come out of Big Box Retailer, but almost a decade ago. They won't run Windows any more (at least not a flavor that will work in today's world), but they are all perfectly happy with a lightweight window manager running under Linux, and can run the latest Firefox quite happily. Their owners, who can't afford a new computer, were grateful to get the results of my dumpster-diving, reformatting, and refurbishing. It costs me (and them) nothing.

"New Computers Sold" obviously would show a massively overwhelming preponderance toward Windows, obviously. But Linux is incredibly useful for slightly older hardware for people on a tight budget. There's a good bit of hardware that would have once had a one-way trip to dumpsterville that is now making a long stop at Linux Station along the way and getting a few more useful years of life.

I agree that 10% seems rather, well, "overly optimistic". My gut tells me it's higher than 2%, though.

To be fair, my gut tells me the two cheeseburgers I had for lunch were just what I needed, so it lies to me sometimes.

Re:No cross platform support either

[GooberToo]

Read my follow up reply above.

The answer is no, because it fits with my observed, anecdotal results.

Why do you doubt it, because it fits with your biases?

No need to answer. Here's a hint. Its a dumb question.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but if Microsoft really wants IE9 to get good uptake, they are going to have to support other platforms. The idea that Mac+Linux is only 2% of the market is largely a myth. Outside of the USA there is HUGE uptake in these platforms (particularly Linux) and in enterprise and corporate environments Linux support in particular is even more critical.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

The answer is no, because it fits with my observed, anecdotal results.

So based off of nothing of any value that can be extrapolated to the population at large.

Why do you doubt it, because it fits with your biases?

No. I doubt it because you have no evidence for your claims other than anecdotes and what you want to be true. The problem is that the same people who put out these 10% figures claiming that web statistics are wrong will on the other hand write an article about IE losing marketshare and use web statistics (from usually the same source as the OS figures they will throw out) to make this claim. It's pure hypocrisy.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

Oddly enough, someone in this same thread made reference to that same 10%.

So what? Just because someone else says wrong things doesn't somehow start to make it true.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

BTW let me guess you pulled this 10% figure from this article, right? One that bases it's entire claims on a Steve Ballmer statement and a year old projection from ABI Research of what Linux netbook sales might be that didn't end up being true. Yeah, that sounds like a extremely reliable basis for the claim. Oh wait...

Re:No cross platform support either

[GooberToo]

No. It was an independent blog.

Why are you so angry about a post which was clearly opinion and then clearly followed up with stating it was completely anecdotal? Even moreso, why did you reply when absolutely no reply was required in the first place, let alone a series of absolutely pointless replies.

Seems your name is well chosen.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Trepidity]

Cross-platformness in a radical sense (all hardware, all operating systems) does seem to be quickly falling by the wayside, and not just with IE only running on Windows..

The Apple version of Webkit (Safari) of course only runs on OSX, or OSX+iOS if you count Mobile Safari as the same browser. Chrome runs on the three major OSs, but only x86, x86-64, and ARM architectures, and is hard to port, due to generating machine code in its Javascript engine. Opera runs on x86, x86-64, ARM, and SuperH, and is reportedly somewhat easier to port, but it's closed-source so who knows. Firefox 4 will run only on x86 and x86-64.

So Firefox 3.6.x may be the last modern web browser that runs basically everywhere. You can get binaries for all major platforms, and Debian currently ships it for all 8 of its supported architectures: x86, x86-64, alpha, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, S390 (!), and SPARC.

Sort of step backwards from the original Unix solution to portability: you write your stuff in C+POSIX, and then it runs everywhere we've ported a C compiler and a POSIX layer. Now apps are sprouting their own architecture-specific virtual machines! Perhaps LLVM will save us? It'd be nice if we managed to agree again on a single point of porting, so instead of saying "Chrome runs on x86, x86-64, and ARM, Firefox runs on x86 and x86-64", you can say "Browser Foo runs on anything with an LLVM port".

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm friends with at least 20 different people who would absolutely laugh in the face of anyone stupid enough to leave the stock OS/programs on a laptop.
I think it is much closer to 10% than 2%.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense.

It is supported by Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008 Server, and Windows 2008 Server R2.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

Why are you so angry

I'm not. Your attempt to deflect from the facts using such a lame argument tactic won't work.

about a post which was clearly opinion and then clearly followed up with stating it was completely anecdotal?

Last time I checked this was a discussion board. If you didn't want people to respond to what you post, then don't post it. Otherwise you will be getting people to respond and *gasp* rebut you.

Even moreso, why did you reply when absolutely no reply was required in the first place, let alone a series of absolutely pointless replies.

Why did you post in the first place if you are just going to get bitchy and whiny about someone responding to you? If you wanted to make your statements in a vacuum where no one can respond to them, start a blog and disable comments. This is a discussion board and any and every comment is fair game to be responded to and as such I responded because I wanted to.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Laptops and Desktops are entirely different things. It's very possible that 10% of desktops are Linux, especially since it's a market that's almost entirely ignored by Apple. If you want a non-Windows desktop that uses real desktop components (instead of the laptop or server components that make up Apple's desktop lineup), you're basically stuck with Linux.

OTOH, it's entirely possible that they're referring to sales where it's a lot easier to find desktops with Linux pre-installed to avoid the Windows tax. So you might have to subtract the people that wipe and install Windows with an existing or pirated license.

I'd expect Linux to have a lower share of laptops since Apple has a larger market share and they're harder to find without Windows pre-installed.

Re:No cross platform support either

[mark72005]

Well, obviously 2009 was the year of Linux on the desktop.

Duh.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently read an article, which I can't seem to find, which purports Linux accounts for roughly 10% of desktops. I find this to be far more likely than the often quoted 2%.

Why do you find it far more likely? Because it fits in with your biases?

And given the frequent niches Linux fills, its far more likely for a Linux desktop to exist which is never accounted for by web statistics.

And yet the same people who whine about those web statistics when it comes to OS marketshare have no problem using them (even from the same source as the OS market share figures they rail against) to show how IE is dying and how Firefox and Chrome are stealing its marketshare.

Actually the numbers come from Microsoft for the 9% of Linux usage.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for reminding me of that inconvenient truth.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft estimates Linux's share of desktop users to be higher than the web stats suggest. In a speech to investors in February 2009, Ballmer presented a slide based on Microsoft's research: it shows Linux's share of business and home PCs about the same as Apple's

Re:No cross platform support either

[LocalH]

The Apple version of Webkit (Safari) of course only runs on OSX, or OSX+iOS if you count Mobile Safari as the same browser.

Really? So the software I'm running isn't actually Safari?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5

Re:No cross platform support either

[Trepidity]

Oops, somehow I missed that it's been out on Windows for a while. Well, still no Linux version, anyway. =]

Re:No cross platform support either

[groslyunderpaid]

Why did you post in the first place if you are just going to get bitchy and whiny about someone responding to you?

Why are you such a faggot?
 
To be fair, it could be the percocet talking...

Re:No cross platform support either

[gmuslera]

Thats exactly the advantage of a cross platform browser. You don't tie your browser to a particular OS and viceversa. As the cost of upgrading every OS there is high, you are still using a browser so unsafe that even Microsoft acknowledges that is a security hole, and probably for browsing the net, making mostly worthless any layer of security you set up there (firewalls, antivirus, etc). In the other hand, moving to Chrome, Firefox or Opera, dont forces you to change right now the operating system, and have more freedom choosing to which OS move next, all the organization or just a few sectors where another could fit better in their needs, along with a good improvement in security, speed and compatibility with what internet is turning into.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Mac uptake is biggest in the USA by far.

Re:No cross platform support either

[supremebob]

True, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1 business in 10 orders a bunch desktops from Dell with Windows Vista pre-installed, and then re-images them with a custom Linux based system image for development or embedded system purposes. That's what my company does, anyway.

Sadly, you can still get better deals from Dell with a copy of Windows pre-installed than you can with no OS installed at all.

Re:No cross platform support either

[shutdown -p now]

Oddly enough, someone in this same thread made reference to that same 10%

His 10% was 2% Linux + 8% OS X - not of 10% Linux alone.

All online stats on websites which do not have tech-oriented audiences show Linux below 2%.

Re:No cross platform support either

[shutdown -p now]

You miss the point of IE. It's a value-add for Windows, not a product in its own right. As such, its goal is not to be on as many PCs out there as possible; rather, it is to put Windows on as many PCs as possible.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Xtifr]

2% (assuming its really that small) of a hundred million is still two million. That's a lot of people to lock out. In any case, I see no performance improvement on my system--zero equals zero. :)

Plus, those many millions of non-Windows users (I won't argue the exact numbers) include many of the brightest and most technically expert--those who provide advice, help and support to the hordes of office-drones (parents, cousins, friends, etc.). Continuing to alienate those experts can't be the best plan. Further, even among Windows users, there are many who prefer cross-platform apps to keep their options open--they may be stuck with Windows today for various specific reasons, but they don't necessarily want to be stuck forever, and using cross-platform apps helps keep the way out open. Plus, as Pthisis mentioned, organizations which have a small percentage of non-Windows users may still prefer to support one cross-platform app for all their users, where possible, and the browser is definitely a place where it's possible.

There's reasons why non-IE use is an order of magnitude greater than non-Windows use, and performance is only one small part of those reasons. Let me know when IE supports anywhere near the range of add-ons that FF does and...I still won't use it, because it still won't run on my system. :)

Re:No cross platform support either

[hairyfeet]

Just pick up a copy of Vista starter/Basic. They are dirt cheap (because nobody wants it) and if all you are doing is testing web pages you don't need the Aero bling anyway. Just install in a VM, turn off all uneeded crap, and there you go, an IE9...in a box. As for TFA, I frankly don't care if IE9 will make me breakfast in the morning while telling me how great I look, by getting rid of just two programs on my customer's PCs (Adobe Reader for Foxit, and IE for FF) I've cut down the infection rate by a good 80%+. The only thing I do different from stock is install ABP to cut down on malware ad risks, and voila! customers that used to have to see my every month only need to come by once a year. They are happy, I get plenty of business from them through referrals so I'm happy, it's just kittens and puppies without IE and Adobe Reader.

I've just seen too many people burnt by IE bugs to make it worth the risk anymore, and if MSFT had a brain (which I would say given the Ballmer monkey and his track record of "hits" is questionable, hell if he wouldn't have brought the Office team in to fix Vista and give us the excellent 7 he would have had double OS fails) they would just close up the IE team and come out with a Webkit or Gecko based browser and call it a day. Lack of compatibility with XP, the by far most popular OS they have ATM, makes IE9 doomed to be a niche that many will simply ignore.

Re:No cross platform support either

[TheRaven64]

Sorry Microsoft, but it isn't 1997 any more

True. Back in 1997, Microsoft was shipping IE 7 for Mac and UNIX (Solaris and HP-UX).

No basic cross platform support for the myriad of platforms means that IE9 will be behind Firefox and Chrome right out of the gate.

Why? Writing a good cross-platform app is much harder than writing a good single-platform app. Look at FireFox on OS X, for example - it doesn't use the system keychain or spell checker, so provides a worse user experience in these two aspects than Safari. Opera does, the address bar behaves differently to every other text field on OS X. Menu layouts, keyboard shortcuts, and dialog behaviours vary between different sets of human interface guidelines. Available system services vary between operating systems. If you want to write a fast, maintainable, easy-to-use, app that integrates well with the rest of the system, targeting a single platform makes life significantly easier. Maybe Mozilla can devote ten times the resources that MS can to their browser, but I doubt it.

With open standards like HTML, it doesn't matter if the browser only runs on one platform, because the site doesn't (in theory) have to care about the browser. If MS can create a browser that is better on Windows than other browsers on other platforms then it gives you a reason to buy Windows. It doesn't have to be better than other browsers on Windows - if FireFox on Windows is better than FireFox on Ubuntu and FireFox on OS X, then FireFox users already have a reason to prefer Windows.

Re:No cross platform support either

[dotancohen]

Could you be more wrong?

If I try really hard... let's see... I got it!
2010: The year of the Linux desktop!

By the way, my "side job" is installing and maintaining Linux desktops. A good half of my business are end users who need little more than a web browser and Skype, and have heard of this newfangled Lennox thing that doesn't get viruses.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

Actually the numbers come from Microsoft for the 9% of Linux usage.

Except that the powerpoint presentation that is used in order to justify that made up number, gives no number at all. Secondly, it's funny how often people claim how Microsoft is untrustworthy yet they have no problems taking what Microsoft claims is the marketshare of Linux and OS X as complete gospel truth. Thanks for proving my point that you will ignore stats from sources if you don't like what it says, but you will use other stats, even from that same supposedly untrustworthy source, if it says something you like.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Lunix Nutcase]

As a further aside, would you be quoting that same presentation of Microsoft had it said that Linux had only 1% of the desktop market? Of course not. You'd be talking about how Microsoft was once again making up things to FUD Linux. Oh the hilarity.

Re:No cross platform support either

[froggymana]

Wasn't there something posted on slashdot recently about how Linux is actually closer to 7-8% usage along with Mac being at like 9%? I'm not sure if that included Android or iOS though.

Re:No cross platform support either

[mldi]

I don't think any sane person would expect an IE on Linux or Mac (not since 5.01 anyway); but the XP omission sucks.

Except web developers who need to test on a widely used browser who aren't using Vista or higher. Well, they wouldn't expect it but it certainly would make life easier. The XP omission is double the pain as that's what I'm sure many web developers are running in their VMs in order to IE test their websites. I think it's safe to say they're single-handedly costing the industry billions of dollars in wasted work time because of these omissions (especially XP).

Re:No cross platform support either

[mldi]

I also find it hard to believe "1 person in 10 who carry a laptop out of a Big Box Retailer is going to install Linux and leave it on", but that's discounting:

A) repurposed older machines that can't run anything else
B) people who build their own machines
C) people shopping online

I don't buy the 10% figure either for Desktop usage, but I think it's probably higher than the 2% reported (1 out of 50? c'mon...)

Re:No cross platform support either

[Zixaphir]

I'm going to make some unfounded but logical assumptions about you. I'm going to assume you're a nerd or at least semi-geeky, because you use slashdot. Next, because of the previous assumption, I'm going to assume that many of your friends are geeks or nerds, and you generally hang around like-minded people. This sets your friend group in a niche. In this niche, there is probably a much higher probability that these people have opinions on technology and like to educate themselves about what is available, as it's logical to assume that a nerd or geek finds technology to be something of a hobby, and people tend to know a lot about things they consider hobbies.

Taking all of this into consideration, I'm going to assume that there is a higher likelihood of people in your friends group who want to put forth the effort to change operating systems on a computer or laptop or netbook, simply for the sake of exposure. So already we've assumed that the people you are friends with are more tech savvy, more opinionated about technology, and therefore more likely to try linux or whatever is out there. So within your group of friends, a percentage of even 20% that use linux would not be surprising. However, much like unscientific pools, it is an inaccurate measure for the rest of the uneducated, uninterested majority population that could give a crap about what their computer is running as long as it does, even with much difficulty (adware, spyware, malware, viri, popups, toolbars, etc), what they want it to do.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developers testing IE on their web sites also need to have Vista or Windows 7 around anyway as IE 7 / IE 8 on Windows XP doesn't have the whole security enhancement of Protected Mode. So if they are only testing on XP they have not fully tested IE.

Re:No cross platform support either

[mark72005]

Even IE6 has been patched to the point where it's acceptable, or at least tolerable, for us. Again, when the switching costs are in view.

We also have many vendor websites that are IE only, or at least don't work as well with other browsers.

Sure, that sucks, but we have to get work done. IE is more or less being dictated to us from upstream.

Re:No cross platform support either

[mldi]

Web developers testing IE on their web sites also need to have Vista or Windows 7 around anyway as IE 7 / IE 8 on Windows XP doesn't have the whole security enhancement of Protected Mode. So if they are only testing on XP they have not fully tested IE.

I think it's safe to say that by far most of the testing done is for layout issues and Javascript functionality. So, not really.

Re:No cross platform support either

[pthisis]

Linux has a much higher installed base than that, but many of the platforms it's installed on are not desktops or handhelds that do a lot of browsing. If you look at servers, Linux pulls down somewhere from 20-40% according to most surveys. I wouldn't be surprised if the total OS installed base is closer to 10% than to 1% for Linux (as a percentage of all machines).

That figure's not really relevant to the issue at hand, though.

The numbers I posted are for web usage. If a significant number of people are spoofing their clients in non-standard ways, the numbers could be skewed; still, there are lots of different sites that show fairly similar distributions. Note that if someone has both a Linux desktop and a Windows desktop but for some reason uses the Linux desktop exclusively for browsing (or vice-versa) that will be reflected in the stats; that seems reasonable if you're discussing what percentage of the audience you're excluding with single-OS solutions.

http://www.atinternet-institute.com/en-us/internet-users-equipment/operating-systems-april-2010/index-1-2-7-197.html
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/operating-systems/
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/webanalyse-systeme.html

The exact numbers vary, but the ballpark seems relatively steady.

Re:No cross platform support either

[nonicknameavailable]

you can run chromium on linux dists :)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.04 Chromium/6.0.472.53 Chrome/6.0.472.53 Safari/534.3

Re:No cross platform support either

[westlake]

I'm not disputing your 2% number, because I don't have any other numbers to dispute it with. But not all computers are new computers. To be fair, my gut tells me the two cheeseburgers I had for lunch were just what I needed, so it lies to me sometimes.

Yes it does.

If you click on a website, someone, somewhere, has another data point for their webstats - and nowhere does the news for the "open web" or Linux look partcularly good: iOS Tops Linux

Their owners, who can't afford a new computer, were grateful to get the results of my dumpster-diving, reformatting, and refurbishing. It costs me (and them) nothing.

Nothing but your time. But your time is not unlimited.

Walmart.com is open 24/7/365 and it stocks 149 flavors of the Windows laptop, 88 desktops and 102 printers for the 64-bit Win 7 world.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Peganthyrus]

Safari runs on Windows.

Your vision of a world where there's one single point of porting would also have to include a single GUI, unless you want to be in a horrible, horrible hell of every program using different user interface conventions.

Re:No cross platform support either

[drunken-yeti]

Don't forget vendors and web portals that cancel their support if your not using some anceint browser...arggh now back to reading my Here you have emails...

Re:No cross platform support either

[HermMunster]

Linux has about 40-50 million users. That's a given as Canonical states they have 12 million unique installs and Red Hat states they have about 24 million unique installs. None of the numbers include servers. With the rest of the distros you can be guaranteed the remaining 6-16 million world wide. And that doesn't include those that they can't count. I myself have 13 installs of Ubuntu, and one of Centos.

That makes the market share around 4-5% for Linux. The Mac has overtaken Linux in market share. That pretty much leaves about 80% or slightly more for Windows. Nonetheless, anyone targeting 40 to 50 million users can't go wrong.

Microsoft also eliminates XP as a candidate for the performance gains as they are mostly acquired through the video acceleration. That's 80% of Microsoft's 80% market share that won't benefit.

Those that do use IE9 will still be riddled with all the security issues of the past.

I couldn't tell right away what was wrong with the picture of that browser until I noticed where the tabs were located. Don't think I'd take that approach. Firefox and Chrome both put the tabs on their own row.

Re:No cross platform support either

[HermMunster]

If you take 1 billion installs of Windows world-wide, then you sum up the Canonical and Red Hat stated known unique installs of their distributions, and then add up the other distributions the total comes to around 40 to 50 million. That brings the total for Linux up around 4-5%, not l.5%

Of the sites that track that information only those that don't have a good methodology give such low numbers to Linux. Those sites that track 50,000 or more sites over a 5 to 10 year period demonstrate that Linux has around 4% of the market. None of those numbers include server installs nor gadget installs.

Apple has more share than Linux so that gives them around 6% or more.

The problem is that most sites don't track world-wide use. There are large parts of the world that don't speak English yet still browse the web without visiting those English language sites. Does one care to venture a guess on how many of those are not included?

And if you took the total of illegitimate installs and ruled them out, Windows market share would be less.

Mark Shuttleworth just made note of at least two contracts for support totalling around 30,000 installs.

Re:No cross platform support either

[HermMunster]

How important are the numbers? Let me ask it another way.

What's the market share of custom built computers? If it is around 10% why would anyone not consider that to be a significant number?

Taken into perspective for the first couple years that Windows 3.x was being adopted there were far fewer than 10 million installs.

Re:No cross platform support either

[HermMunster]

Right there you know the stats are misrepresenting Linux's market share.

I certainly wouldn't be saying that Honda has a small market share for their motorcycles due to only seeing a few at a Harley Davidson motorcycle rally.

And, though you may think Honda has a low market share for motorcycles here in the US, in Japan that's what the company is known for, not cars.

Re:No cross platform support either

[HermMunster]

I have had people come to me repeatedly and say that they were impressed with Linux, most importantly with the stability. I never have people tell me how impressed they are with Windows.

And those that do tell me are novices that are retired. They like the software, the OS, and that it's all free.

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm. Running Firefox 4.0b3 on Linux/PPC. Yes, I had to compile it myself, and yes it require two small tweaks to the source, but I fully expect it to be available in Debian after it comes out of beta. Also, Fennec runs on ARM, so I'd be somewhat surprised if the ARM version of Firefox was going to fall by the wayside.
In other news, "Firefox 4" is kind of an arbitrary version number. The changes in appearance between 3.6 and 4.0 are actually bigger than the changes in the code. Firefox 4 was Firefox 3.7 when it was in development.

All this is of course conveniently ignoring the more 'simple' webkit-based browsers that work just fine on any architecture where webkit is available.

-John

Re:No cross platform support either

[Trepidity]

Isn't Firefox's new JS engine, JaegerMonkey, only available for x86 and x86-64?

Re:No cross platform support either

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be absolutely right, considering he said 1.5% of the market is Linux, which would mean 1.5 people out of 100 coming out of a big box retailer may install Linux on their laptop. That sounds much more accurate, and I freakin' install Linux on any machine I manage to get my hands on.

Re:No cross platform support either

[BZ]

> Firefox 4 will run only on x86 and x86-64.

Uh... Firefox 4 will run on x86 and x86-64 and ARM. It will also run (but not be officially supported, last I checked), on SPARC and some other architectures, but so far without a JS JIT (though there's work to port the JIT to SPARC by some people who're actually using SPARC). The status of PPC seems to be that it will probably run but not be officially supported, though that hasn't been set in stone. In either case, there will be no JIT on PPC.

Targeting LLVM from a JIT may or may not work depending on the speed of the LLVM compiler; we'll have to see how it goes. In the meantime, as I understand it Chrome has two completely separate compilers with no shared code even for the "simple" cases of x86 and x86-64.... Mozilla has more sharing, with separate codegen backends but a lot of shared logic, but even so some things have to be different on x86 and x86-64 for optimal performance (like the basic in-memory representation of JS values). I can't speak to Opear's code, not having seen it.

Re:No cross platform support either

[trickyD1ck]

I study computer science, and of my friends one runs Linux, maybe five run Macintosh OS and the rest—many scores—run Windows. I think it is much closer to 1% than 2%. And this is in Europe. How's that for anecdotal evidence?

Re:No cross platform support either

[trickyD1ck]

So double development costs, quadruple test and support costs, degrade experience for 95% of users—all to get additional 5% of the market? This does not look like a sound business plan to me.

Re:No cross platform support either

[rjstanford]

The Apple version of Webkit (Safari) of course only runs on OSX, or OSX+iOS if you count Mobile Safari as the same browser.

Or, to put it another way, the standard Apple wrapper for Webkit is called Safari. The standard Windows wrappers for Webkit is called Chrome. The standard Linux wrapper for Webkit is also called Chrome.

When it comes to layout testing, the engine is vastly more important than the toolbar. Now, Chrome and Safari do use different Javascript interpreters, but I find that JS issues are almost always differences in the DOM rather than in implementing JS itself, so once again we're back to Webkit being the common denominator.

...will run only on x86 and x86-64.

Which, at the moment, represent the massively huge majority of systems that might want to support full-experience web-browsing (as opposed to just using HTTP occasionally). Until that changes, why would people increase their development and test cycles to support a miniscule market? Adding architectures to support does have a very real cost.

Sort of step backwards from the original Unix solution to portability: you write your stuff in C+POSIX, and then it runs everywhere we've ported a C compiler and a POSIX layer.

This would only be true if POSIX had been complete - for that matter, if C had been a complete specification. Big endian vs. little endian, for example? Portability always involves tradeoffs, either in development, testing, or performance. Always.

Having said that, non-display-interacting Java is amazingly close, to the point that we don't even blink twice when it comes to spinning up EARs on OSX vs. Linux, for example. But its not great in the GUI world.

Re:No cross platform support either

[raphael75]

I don't know where you get your numbers, but ie is only 60% of the web browser market:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

Re:No cross platform support either

[pthisis]

The numbers are for OS, not browser. Lots of people use Firefox, Chrome, etc on Windows.

Re:No cross platform support either

[pthisis]

The question is about web browser market share. That's a different number from the total installed OS base, as discussed upthread (a server-centric OS likely does less browsing per installed copy than a desktop-centric one). There are tons of sites and aggregates that show the same ballpark figures.

It's not a matter of English-centrism, either; Germany's certainly considered a Linux stronghold, but most German sites show the same numbers. See, e.g., http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/webanalyse-systeme.html (which aggregates results from a number of German sites) shows 91.6% Windows, 5.1% Mac, and 1.5% Linux (.2% of which is Android).

There's another comparison chart here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
they have numbers from 12 sources ("All of these sources monitor a substantial number of web sites. Statistics that relate to a single web site are excluded.") and they also have a running average which comes out to 88.9% Windows, 6.2% Mac, and 1.3% Linux (.2% of which is Android).

Pretty much evey major source these days is showing numbers around the same ballpark.

Re:No cross platform support either

[jesser]

Firefox's JS engine now has three execution modes: interpreter (all platforms), tracing jit (several platforms), method jit aka "jaegermonkey" (x86, x86-64, ARM). On x86 you're probably using all three. On less popular platforms, it uses only the interpreter, which is slower but still works. And even the interpreter has gotten faster as part of the overall performance effort.

Re:No cross platform support either

[commodore64_love]

>>>Back in 1997, Microsoft was shipping IE 7 for Mac and UNIX

Unlikely. Maybe IE 3 which was released in 1997. And they stopped supporting Macs way back with the obsolete 5. "It's even integrated into Windows 7." The US DOJ and EU Court will soon be knocking on Microsoft's door. Users are supposed to be able to choose their browser, and never need to use IE.

Here's to hoping

[Pojut]

I'm really hoping that IE9 brings Internet Explorer up to speed and injects some more competition into the browser wars. Still, due to the stigma put on IE, gaining back market share will be tough...

Re:Here's to hoping

[causality]

I'm really hoping that IE9 brings Internet Explorer up to speed and injects some more competition into the browser wars. Still, due to the stigma put on IE, gaining back market share will be tough...

One thing amused me. In a way the story or at least the summary is doublespeak. If so, it won't be helping that stigma:

Internet Explorer has long been the slowest browser by a wide margin. IE9 has turned that around in dramatic fashion, using hardware acceleration and a new JavaScript engine it calls Chakra, which compiles scripts in the background and uses multiple processor cores.

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

Re:Here's to hoping

[tepples]

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

The resources present in a PC that can run Windows 6.x Aero include multiple cores and an integrated stream processor (also called a GPU). So yes, IE is being more efficient by using the resources that are there instead of ignoring them.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Nemesisghost]

Unfortunately I really doubt that MS will get back any of its market share, or at least not enough to make a noticeable difference. This is still great news. If what the reports say are true, and that IE9 is more standards compliant and supports HTML5, then it will make web developers more willing to use said standards & HTML5. I know a lot of companies won't use new tech unless there is a sizable market share that has access to it. Since IE is the default browser for the largest share of computers and MS will no doubt push IE9 out with an update, this will provide companies with the incentive to start using the newer tech that IE9 supports.

This of course doesn't solve the problem with people who won't or can't upgrade past WinXP & IE6.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Nadaka]

IE9: Now injecting malware faster than ever.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't read it the same way as you. From what I understand, they improved their Javascript performance by using a totally new enigne, added multi-core support and a the same time started a new trend, now followed by FF and other browsers, to use GPU to accelerate graphical tasks such as rendering text and bitmaps. To me it sounds that they have spent an incredible amount of time/rersouces and practically rewrote the whole thing from scratch; something everybody just hoped they would someday do.

Re:Here's to hoping

[tepples]

I know a lot of companies won't use new tech unless there is a sizable market share that has access to it.

Google offers a "Chrome Frame" plug-in for IE that renders pages with WebKit instead of MSHTML if they opt in using <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">. I know of at least one online store that supports IE 8 but recommends Chrome Frame for users of ancient IE.

Re:Here's to hoping

[GooberToo]

And it doesn't help that the mozilla team recently identified IE as detecting various benchmarks to make IE look up to twenty times faster than it really is.

Until Microsoft stops purposely misleading people with their completely bogus benchmark results, their stigma of poor quality and low performance is nothing but well deserved.

Re:Here's to hoping

[cybrthng]

Nope.

I've had a multi-core CPU and dedicated GPU for nearly 10+ years now. Its about time the web browser takes advantage of such.

In fact, I would suggest the opposite of what you say. The work required to scale up the application using all available resources makes a more robust framework to build upon which is better for the long run.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Rogerborg]

IE is being more efficient by using the resources that are there instead of ignoring them.

Well, enjoy the screaming from your fans (spinny, not swoony) every time you load MSN.com. "Efficiency" is a big place - where do you live?

Re:Here's to hoping

[causality]

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

The resources present in a PC that can run Windows 6.x Aero include multiple cores and an integrated stream processor (also called a GPU). So yes, IE is being more efficient by using the resources that are there instead of ignoring them.

This word "efficiency" ... it does not mean what you think it means. Hint: they increased the speed but the way they did so gives no reason to believe that they have improved the efficiency. It's abundantly possible that they have worsened it, in fact.

IE may still be the slowest browser in terms of the quality of its code and its failure to avoid bloat. It's just that now it can place more of a burden on the hardware to make up for this. I mean, the GPU *and* multiple cores? That damned well better be faster than a single-threaded/single-process browser with no GPU acceleration. That still doesn't say anything about efficiency or code quality.

Bottom line: if other browsers started using the same resources, would IE still be the slowest? Because you can expect it's only a matter of time before most browsers start doing this or at least offer the option, and many of them will do so in a cross-platform way. Where's the reason to believe that IE is inherently better or more well-designed, that any speed advantage it enjoys now isn't merely a transient and meaningless effect of implementing this idea first?

Re:Here's to hoping

[Lunix Nutcase]

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

So why is this somehow a negative for IE to do it yet you see no issue when Google and Mozilla do the exact same thing to boost performance in their browsers? Hypocritical much?

Re:Here's to hoping

[KarmaMB84]

That's not even remotely what that blog post actually says.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Joce640k]

Does it mean websites can now exploit bugs in the Ring-0 graphics driver as well as all those other things?

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

nope. They are actually using the existing hardware efficiently. Its pretty much what everyone predicted 5 years ago. Release multicore CPUs and allow GPGPU's and it won't matter until programmers start writing code and making tools to actually use the hardware.

Re:Here's to hoping

[MozeeToby]

The blog post calls it 'overspecialization for a specific test'. The results certainly do look... shall we say, concerning? Adding in a single 'true' statement sent the execution time from 1ms to 22.6ms with nearly identical results by adding in an extra return statement. It does start to look like someone hard coded the engine to spit out the correct answer when it encountered the benchmark. I'd be interested to see the results of the other JS engines and if they have similar anomalies with minor changes to the benchmarking code.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Zero__Kelvin]

"And it doesn't help that the mozilla team recently identified IE as detecting various benchmarks to make IE look up to twenty times faster than it really is.

"That's not even remotely what that blog post actually says."

FTA that Goober Too linked to:

One last issue that can crop up has to do with over-specialization for a specific test. While I was running the SunSpider tests above, I noticed that IE9 got a score that was at least 10x faster than every other browser on SunSpider's math-cordic test. That would be an impressive result, but it doesn't seem to hold up in the presence of minor variations. I made a few variations on the test: one with an extra "true;" statement (diff), and one with a "return;" statement (diff). You can run those two tests along with the original math-cordic.js file here.

While you are correct that it doesn't explicitly state it, it is pretty hard to draw any other conclusion if you have a modicum of a clue.

Re:Here's to hoping

[GooberToo]

How is it confirming what I said, "not even remotely what the glob post actually says." It clearly documents IE returning a completely bogus result clocking in at over 20x what it can actually run. There is even a graphic.

I suggest you re-read the link because your post does "not even remotely [reflect] what the glob post actually says."

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

While I certainly appreciate your point, isn't taking advantage of available hardware actually creating efficiency on some level? After all, if *nothing* used hardware acceleration, what, in fact, would be the point of owning all those fancy graphics cards and multiple cores? Multithreaded and parallel processing takes a lot of re-thinking, and isn't always possible. Even SmartPhones are moving to dual-core next year. Personally, I give them kudos for taking this step. If they can make smaller, more efficient code, too -- all the better.

What they need is some in-house old-school Unix developers, who are used to writing beautifully elegant, simplistic code geared toward minimal size and maximum efficiency, prioritized over features. Browsers serve a very basic purpose, and largely adding more features should rank a MUCH lower priority than supporting all the standards, compliance to specifications, and cranking out the most memory and processor efficient code possible. In these days, when people often have 20-30 browsing sessions open while doing research, while simultaneously running a ton of other apps, it's more important than ever to be efficient, especially with the memory footprint. Regardless, it sounds like a step in the right direction, taking a nod from the direction of Snow Leopard. In the age of increasingly embedded computing, code efficiency is seriously under-rated, but at least it seems (perhaps superficially?) that it's on the radar of some of the larger companies...

Re:Here's to hoping

[Mongoose Disciple]

Bottom line: if other browsers started using the same resources, would IE still be the slowest?

You could equally say: if IE's JavaScript engine were as fast as Firefox's, would it still be the slowest?

Browser speed, like many things in the software world, is a constant arms' race. (At least, since the rise of Firefox some years ago made it an actual race again instead of the sad 'IE wins by default' show.) I'm sure that, if what IE9 is doing is effective/smart, other browsers will do something similar in their next iteration -- but meanwhile, IE would be doing something else in its next iteration, be it more efficiency, even better use of the extra resources, whatever.

In other words, I think it's disingenuous to assume that software you like will quickly absorb the smartest features of software you don't like, and that the reverse won't also happen to some degree.

Re:Here's to hoping

[GooberToo]

As was stated in the post; there should be little if any variance.

Re:Here's to hoping

[cybrthng]

Efficiencies can be found by optimizing the workflow in which case IE 9 optimally takes advantage of GPU or multiple cores for better performance.

Re:Here's to hoping

[tepples]

Does it mean websites can now exploit bugs in the Ring-0 graphics driver as well as all those other things?

How would this be the case any more than 2D web sites could exploit bugs in the 2D graphics driver?

Re:Here's to hoping

[Blakey Rat]

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

And you would be happier, of course, if Microsoft ignored potential avenues for making their product faster? "They actually used the full capacity of my computer to make their product faster! THOSE FIENDS!"

Re:Here's to hoping

[pkinetics]

There is nothing wrong with an application using existing hardware to run. However, and this is all based on speculation since we are not there yet, is that it is not my browser that is the problem on the Internet, but that now every Joe Schmoe company is going to be ramming excessively graphical crap to my system on the assumption that I have a full blown graphical super deluxe system that will run it. Numerous sites add paint without adding any real content just to get people's attention. In the long term, then we end up back to the game of "Site best viewed with..." Instead of it being browser it will say with 1GB of video RAM, etc... The more things change, the more they stay the same. On a side note, my humorous observation is that we have moved back to dumb terminals as our browser, but at some point, they are moving us back to client server...

Re:Here's to hoping

[groslyunderpaid]

This word "efficiency" ... it does not mean what you think it means.

Arguing that making more efficient use of existing hardware doesn't constitute making your browser more efficient is mere semantics. This is one of those points that is relative to where you are standing.

Re:Here's to hoping

[shutdown -p now]

You know, I have one benchmark for all browsers: it's Slashdot in "OMGWTFWeb2.0" mode. Between crappy HTML with heaps of elements that spam browser's DOM, and equally crappy JS to load stuff, it's better at putting a hefty load on any browser I've seen to date, and more realistic then synthetic tests. E.g. it clearly demonstrates just how much Chrome is faster than Firefox. And God forbid you open it in IE8...

Well, I'm posting this using IE9, and I have to say that it passed the Slashdot browser test - scrolling is fast even on older stories with a huge number of comments, and comments expand in a blink. Hopefully that will last until the next Great Slashdot Rewrite.

Re:Here's to hoping

[KarmaMB84]

The behavior is reproducible with different code. If you insert the return. It jumps to about 40ms on my machine. If you modify one of the branches to not modify any variables outside of for loop (modify a new variable inside the loop instead), it drops to 16ms. The code *should* still be doing the same amount of work but because one branch has no effect, it probably doesn't even get compiled. If you modify both branches in the same way, the result drops to 8ms which appears to be just the time it takes to loop through 12 times multiplied by the 25000 times the function is called since it modifies the Step variable. Without a return, it seems to drop the entire loop but not the assignment of local variables. Not calling the function at all would cause the loop which normally counts to 25000 to also not do anything and the test would complete instantly.

I've tinkered with it enough to say it's more than likely nothing but the pre-compiler optimizing things by dropping statements that don't really do anything (can't be returned or aren't going to be because the function doesn't return at all). Inserting a true statement probably just causes it to not do the optimization for whatever reason (perhaps just any built-in statement will cause it). Also most of the speed up can still be gained even if the return statement is there if the branches in the loop are just written differently to have no effect on the function's local variables.

Re:Here's to hoping

[weicco]

They have one dimension more to exploit now :P

Re:Here's to hoping

[Zero__Kelvin]

I accept your hypothesis that the behavior could indeed be at least partially the result of a piss poor bytecode compiler, though I find your argument of proof less than compelling. As the saying goes, never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. OTOH, the two are not mutually exclusive. It is at least as likely that their optimizations are flaky and they are acting nefariously.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the link says, mod parent as flamebait.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?

The resources present in a PC that can run Windows 6.x Aero include multiple cores and an integrated stream processor (also called a GPU). So yes, IE is being more efficient by using the resources that are there instead of ignoring them.

This word "efficiency" ... it does not mean what you think it means. Hint: they increased the speed but the way they did so gives no reason to believe that they have improved the efficiency. It's abundantly possible that they have worsened it, in fact. IE may still be the slowest browser in terms of the quality of its code and its failure to avoid bloat. It's just that now it can place more of a burden on the hardware to make up for this. I mean, the GPU *and* multiple cores? That damned well better be faster than a single-threaded/single-process browser with no GPU acceleration. That still doesn't say anything about efficiency or code quality. Bottom line: if other browsers started using the same resources, would IE still be the slowest? Because you can expect it's only a matter of time before most browsers start doing this or at least offer the option, and many of them will do so in a cross-platform way. Where's the reason to believe that IE is inherently better or more well-designed, that any speed advantage it enjoys now isn't merely a transient and meaningless effect of implementing this idea first?

uhmm.. if other browsers do catch up and/or pass, you have a point, but.. I do not understand this notion that utilizing available resources and hardware is bad. It's like the people staring at their memory meter, and complaining about available RAM being used, what the heck do you have it for?

It's like saying a game is crappy coded, because it uses the 3D hardware of your graphics card for accelleration, instead of coding efficiently enough to not needing it (and just letting it run idle instead).

Re:Here's to hoping

[shutdown -p now]

It does not, however, document said bogus result as 1) being intentional, and 2) being IE fault, and not a flaw in the test.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

You find his argument of proof less than compelling? Go eat a bowl of dicks. At least he did something to test it. All of your "proof" was reading some shit off of a random web site.

Re:Here's to hoping

[cbhacking]

Um... technically yes, but Flash (among other things) was already perfectly capable of that. Hardware-accelerated Flash has been available around for months.

You can turn off the hardware acceleration if you're truly that paranoid. It's in the Internet Options, under Advanced.

Re:Here's to hoping

[drinkypoo]

Is Slashdot actually usable in OMGWTFBBQ mode in Chrome on Linux? I have a Phenom II 720 OC'd on air to 3.2 GHz with an nVidia GT240 and it wasn't enough machine for it with Firefox.

Re:Here's to hoping

[wbo]

In Vista and Windows 7 only a small part of the graphics driver resides in Ring 0. Most of the graphics driver runs as unprivileged code so the potential for a kernel mode (privileged) exploit in a graphics driver is fairly small.

Re:Here's to hoping

[SiChemist]

But, it's not making "more efficient use of existing hardware". It's using more hardware resources. More efficient means increased performance without increased resource requirements. It could cause a negative impact on overall system performance as it contends with other applications (like the aero window manager) for resources.

I'm not sure you know what the word "semantics" means either.

Just released where?

[cybrthng]

As far as I can tell joe public can't get it until after the official announcement @ 10:30 PDT. Anyone have a beta download link? Still not on connect as of now

Re:Just released where?

[MagicM]

http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ (seriously)

Re:Just released where?

[cybrthng]

All i see there is 9/15/10 :)

Another hour i guess we'll see the downloads

Re:Just released where?

[CannonballHead]

I'm looking at it right now, there's a big Download link in the top right...

Re:Just released where?

[ihatejobs]

You might want to note that your post is roughly an hour after his...

SO MUCH FAIL!

Re:Just released where?

[CannonballHead]

That does not make my statement false. I did note the time. I figured it'd still be worth mentioning...

What I actually didn't notice was the thread starting post. Oops.

Re:Just released where?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide it's been available there since about 10:00 AM when I got it

A Fuller review, with benchmarks

[mikemuch]

Internet Explorer 9 Reviewed, Benchmarked

request to the peanut gallery:

[buddyglass]

Someone with Windows 7, a decent 3d graphics card, and a dual or quad-core CPU please benchmark this new IE9 beta vs. the currently released versions for FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera, using:

• Sunspider
• Kraken
• Peacekeeper

And, if you could, break out the scores on the individual Peacekeeper tests. I intentionally omitted V8 in the list of benchmarks since its so inconsistent between runs.

I'd do it myself but I don't have a Win7 installation to use.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[cybrthng]

Once the beta is out, i'll give this a shot and post my results.

AMD Phenom 955 Quad Core with ATI 4850 SLI & Windows 7

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

Absolutely do not include Sunspider in the results as Mozilla has caught Microsoft (IE) cheating. They are actively detecting these benchmarks are falsely providing results up to twenty times faster than they are able to actually execute the code. The only reason they got caught was because one benchmark was so much faster than what everyone else was doing and the nature of the benchmark seemed unlikely anyone would have such a significant advantage.

IE + Sunspider = absolute lies. The results are rigged.

The later two are far more likely to provide meaningful results. And Kraken is specifically designed to reflect exactly that.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[VGPowerlord]

Absolutely do not include Sunspider in the results as Mozilla has caught Microsoft (IE) cheating. They are actively detecting these benchmarks are falsely providing results up to twenty times faster than they are able to actually execute the code. The only reason they got caught was because one benchmark was so much faster than what everyone else was doing and the nature of the benchmark seemed unlikely anyone would have such a significant advantage.

IE + Sunspider = absolute lies. The results are rigged.

The later two are far more likely to provide meaningful results. And Kraken is specifically designed to reflect exactly that.

Did you link to the wrong page or something? The blog entry you linked to says nothing of the sort, and shows IE9 as slower than every browser other than Firefox 4 in Sunspider.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

Read the whole thing already. That's two replies from two people who didn't even read the damn link. There is even a graphic. Just read the article rather than pretend you did.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[buddyglass]

Yeah, I was aware of the bogus Sunspider behavior on IE9, but was still curious about the results.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[cybrthng]

Installed the beta and initial speed is very impressive. Slashdot runs quicker in IE9 than it does on Chrome 6 or Opera 10.62. Reddit is also noticeably faster.. Page navigation in eBay is so fast that it doesn't seem like its going across the internet.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[armanox]

Machine: Lenovo ThinkCentre with an Intel Core i5 660 (3.33GHz), 8GB DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 Profession x64, and nVidia Geforce GT310
Kraken Benchmark Results:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta
Google Chrome 6.0.472.59 Beta
Mozilla Firefox 4 beta 6

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[PhrozenOne]

I just benchmarked the new IE9 beta ( I am loving the new look :) ) Hardware Information: Core 2 duo e5300 @ 2,6GhZ,XFX ATI Radeon 4770 512 MB DDR5, 2x2 GB A-DATA@800MhZ, Gigabyte Ep45 UD3P mobo, WD Black 640 GB Software information: Windows 7 Ultimate x64, started programs during benchmark: Skype, MS OneNote, BitDefender 2011, about 20 IE9 tabs Results Sun Spider: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B19,18,18,18,18%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B25,23,24,24,23%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B19,19,19,19,20%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B6,6,6,6,6%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B13,14,12,13,13%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B20,21,20,20,20%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B3,3,3,3,3%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B2,2,2,2,2%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B6,5,5,6,5%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B4,4,4,4,5%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B11,11,10,11,11%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B3,3,3,2,3%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B8,8,8,8,9%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B6,6,6,6,7%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B8,7,7,7,7%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B24,23,24,24,24%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B24,24,24,27,24%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B1,1,1,1,1%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B22,21,21,22,21%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B11,11,11,11,11%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B26,25,25,24,24%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B8,9,9,8,8%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B24,24,23,23,23%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B34,33,34,33,63%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B39,39,39,38,39%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B22,22,22,22,22%5D%7D Kraken No results, it waited for about 10 minutes, but the test just stops at one point and starts all overa again, just like in a loop. PeaceKeeper 2521 Points Rendering 2197 Social Networking 1309 Complex Graphics 6245 Data 5317 DOM Operations 1811 Text Parsing 3681

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[PhrozenOne]

I just benchmarked the new IE9 beta ( I am loving the new look :) )

Hardware Information:
Core 2 duo e5300 @ 2,6GhZ,XFX ATI Radeon 4770 512 MB DDR5, 2x2 GB A-DATA@800MhZ, Gigabyte Ep45 UD3P mobo, WD Black 640 GB

Software information:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64,
started programs during benchmark: Skype, MS OneNote, BitDefender 2011, about 20 IE9 tabs

Results

Sun Spider:
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B19,18,18,18,18%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B25,23,24,24,23%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B19,19,19,19,20%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B6,6,6,6,6%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B13,14,12,13,13%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B20,21,20,20,20%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B3,3,3,3,3%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B2,2,2,2,2%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B6,5,5,6,5%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B4,4,4,4,5%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B11,11,10,11,11%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B3,3,3,2,3%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B8,8,8,8,9%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B6,6,6,6,7%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B8,7,7,7,7%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B24,23,24,24,24%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B24,24,24,27,24%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B1,1,1,1,1%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B22,21,21,22,21%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B11,11,11,11,11%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B26,25,25,24,24%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B8,9,9,8,8%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B24,24,23,23,23%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B34,33,34,33,63%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B39,39,39,38,39%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B22,22,22,22,22%5D%7D

Kraken

No results, it waited for about 10 minutes, but the test just stops at one point and starts all overa again, just like in a loop.

PeaceKeeper

2521 Points
Rendering 2197
Social Networking 1309
Complex Graphics 6245
Data 5317
DOM Operations 1811
Text Parsing 3681

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[buddyglass]

If you can disable 3 of your CPU cores, it would be interesting to see how much of IE9's performance advantage is due to its use of multiple cores.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[Blakey Rat]

Ok, I can't speak for the grandparent, but I read the whole thing. The blog entry mentions it with kind of a "huh, that's odd" attitude-- it definitely doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating. Nor do any of the comments. So I think you're blowing it out of proportion.

Look, if Microsoft wanted to cheat on a benchmark, would they:
1) Only bother to add the cheat in to a single small test out of hundreds
2) Make the result instant, or close to it, instead of a realistic execution time, thus making it easy to detect?

No, of course not. What you're looking at is a bug, either in the test, or in IE9.

It doesn't help that the entire rest of the blog article focuses on:
1) How crappy these benchmarks are
2) How they don't take into-account caching, which is exactly the kind of thing that could produce a 1ms response when you're expecting a 20ms response

Maybe the only "problem" is that IE's JS engine saw though the test, said, "hm, this code doesn't do jack" and skipped it.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

it definitely doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating. Nor do any of the comments. So I think you're blowing it out of proportion.

Excuse me for drawing the only possible conclusion and stating it here. Silly me for assuming readers of a technology centric website would be able to reach the same, obvious, and sole conclusion.

Basically, if you did not reach said conclusion, slashdot is over your head. And the moderators are fucking insane. Offtopic this for completely on topic posts. And flaimbait that for polite replies.

Fucking troll moderators and showing their stupidity like crazy today - as is the slashdot reading/posting population.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[Blakey Rat]

Excuse me for drawing the only possible conclusion and stating it here. Silly me for assuming readers of a technology centric website would be able to reach the same, obvious, and sole conclusion.

Dude. I considered the exact same evidence you did, and drew a different conclusion. As did the person who *actually ran the tests* (let me remind you, the source for all of this doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating.) Maybe you should relax a bit, take a deep breath, and think, "hm, maybe there is more than one conclusion to be drawn..."

Basically, if you did not reach said conclusion, slashdot is over your head. And the moderators are fucking insane. Offtopic this for completely on topic posts. And flaimbait that for polite replies.

Fucking troll moderators and showing their stupidity like crazy today - as is the slashdot reading/posting population.

Well, make sure you call them stupid and swear a lot. That's almost certainly going to help.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

Maybe the only "problem" is that IE's JS engine saw though the test, said, "hm, this code doesn't do jack" and skipped it.

LOL! Brilliant deduction. No wonder you didn't understand in the least what you read. Allow me to explain it to you since you very clearly must have it explained to you.

If IE's JS is so awesome, it would have optimized away nop instructions and returned the exact same result with the same runtimes. That's entirely the point. Meaning, the test proves this wasn't the result of some super smart IE optimization. Rather, the only possible result is IE specifically looks for that test and returns a canned result. Minor, completely useless changes to the test complete screw up IE's benchmark detection which prevents it from cheating. As a result, operations which should have zero effect result in IE performing 20x slower that its cheat otherwise provides. Meaning, when it actually executes, rather than cheats, its 20x slower. That's the only possible conclusion.

The JS engine's optimizer should see exactly ZERO differences in the generated code. The addition of an explicit "return" vs an implicit "return" is absolutely proof this is not optimization trickery.

In other words, the ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION is exactly as I depicted and exactly as IE troll moderators are working so hard to hide via their false, trollish moderations.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

As did the person who *actually ran the tests

Uhh...the person who documented the test drew the exact same conclusion I did. That's entirely his point. The only difference is he was politically correct and didn't state the obvious conclusion - my conclusion, which I did state.

Basically you're arguing that you're right because you're wrong. Brilliant.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[Blakey Rat]

The JS engine's optimizer should see exactly ZERO differences in the generated code. The addition of an explicit "return" vs an implicit "return" is absolutely proof this is not optimization trickery.

Absolute is an extremely strong word. It could simply mean there's a bug in IE's JS parser, so that it produces different results with the return than it does without.

I mean, this is a useless conversation, because obviously you drew your ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION long before you even bothered to think even slightly about the evidence. It's obvious from your posts that you have such a mouth-foaming blind rage towards Microsoft, you'd never give them a fair shake in a million years.

In other words, the ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION is exactly as I depicted and exactly as IE troll moderators are working so hard to hide via their false, trollish moderations.

I honestly think you're paranoid, and need help. At the very least, you need to turn off your computer for a few hours. They're not all out to get you, man.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

This is not a parser error. If it were, it would be impossible for IE's JS to ever produce code which can perform. So your argument is its obviously a simple bug which destroyed JS performance, which is likely to effect any and all JS code and yet they are somehow able to pull of super fast optimizations which are specific to a benchmark and seemingly beyond the ability of any other JS engine.

Or, we can make the obvious assumption. Others are frequently caught at cheating in benchmarks. Obviously MS go caught cheating. Obviously MS cheats. Either that, or according to you, they have some really horrible bugs which means its impossible they could perform so well in every other use.

Holy shit. Dumber than a bag of hammers.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[KarmaMB84]

I've actually tinkered with the code for the test. They're probably using very simplistic optimizations such as

1) Does the loop modify variables outside the loop or call anything that could?

2) Is the modified variable outside the function and are there any function calls that could return the local variables or use them in some way?

I believe the optimizations they apply are simplistic and probably intended to get the most obvious stuff without slowing down the engine. Making a function call such as FIXED(30) which doesn't really do anything as far as side effects prevents the loop from being optimized away the same way the true statement does... in fact you can replace return with FIXED(30) in that code and it's the same thing. The engine probably doesn't check whether the function calls actually use local variable or returns them. If there's a function call or other statement, it simply doesn't optimize the loop away.

Re:request to the peanut gallery:

[GooberToo]

Actually, you need to take a closer look. Your argument completely agrees with everything I'm saying.

If they have extremely simplistic optimizations, its impossible for them to be competitive. Period.

If they the checks you recommend, the provided code would have zero affect on runtime, other than parsing and code generation, and executing of a single, nop instruction. Which isn't likely to account for more than a fraction of a ms.

You also need to take a closer look at the example provided. This has zero to do with loop evaluation. Placing an implicit return outside of a loop is not going to affect code generation at all. Placing a "true ;" above the loop, at worse, is going to allocate an anonymous variable which is never referenced. If returning, which it always, already has to do costs 22x in performance, it is literally impossible for IE to ever be competitive with other browsers - ever! Period. At yet they clearly are competitive in the benchmark so we can assume this isn't a fundamental JS return/optimization problem.

Thusly, the ONLY possible, reasonable conclusion is that MS is cheating their asses off in these benchmarks.

Basically, most everyone that replied, and the moderators, are idiots and have no fucking idea what the subject matter is, let alone capable of understanding what it is they read.

integrated into Windows 7

[commodore64_love]

The US DOJ and EU Court will soon be knocking on Microsoft's door. Users are supposed to be able to choose their browser, and never need to use IE.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[spamking]

The US DOJ and EU Court will soon be knocking on Microsoft's door. Users are supposed to be able to choose their browser, and never need to use IE.

Some parts of SharePoint won't work on anything but IE. Specifically the Project Server 2010 Web App . . . I've tried to use it in Firefox but can't until I switch to IE.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[MozeeToby]

"Integrated into Windows 7" just means that the rendering and java script engines will be used to render things in the OS. Or do you really think that they should be required to let you change what is really very basic OS behavior?

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[DeathFromSomewhere]

There aren't any new features that other browsers can't implement. No antitrust BS required.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[AltairDusk]

Which is one of a very long list of things that make me unhappy with Sharepoint, it's everything including the kitchen sink but doesn't seem to do anything very well.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[spamking]

Which is why I urge folks to only use SharePoint as a last resort. I've had more success using Joomla! and folks don't seem to miss SharePoint.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[AltairDusk]

Believe me I wish my work would use just about anything else.

Re:integrated into Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Honest question: does Safari work on anything but an Apple OS?

This just in...

[Aggrav8d]

Javascript engine speeds have nothing to do with quality of code. It's all about how cool a name you come up with for your engine. IE9 is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with their "Chakra" engine, sure to appeal to a wide market of yuppie-wanna-be-hippie 30 somethings. Following this news, Mozilla has announced their next javascript engine will be called "unicorn bacon", and apple have bought the rights to use the name "iMegatron". The future is now!

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Mozilla has announced their next javascript engine will be called "unicorn bacon"...

MMMMmmmmmm Bacon!

Re:This just in...

[Laxori666]

I'm not sure unicorn bacon would be a good one... you were on the right track with combining two things that are awesome, but I don't know about killing unicorns to make bacon out of them, regardless how awesome that bacon would be =P.

Re:This just in...

[Mongoose Disciple]

don't know about killing unicorns to make bacon out of them, regardless how awesome that bacon would be =P

But think of the (U)BLTs you could make!

Re:This just in...

[AltairDusk]

"unicorn bacon"

But bacon is already magical! What could unicorn possibly add?

Re:This just in...

[electron sponge]

When your arteries clog, the cholesterol is rainbow-colored.

Re:This just in...

[munch117]

Following this news, Mozilla has announced their next javascript engine will be called "unicorn bacon", and apple have bought the rights to use the name "iMegatron". The future is now!

Nah, it'll be a while yet. Apple recently suffered a severe setback, when security concerns forced Jobs to bin the cutting-edge development branch, "Shuriken Luggage".

Re:This just in...

[mystik]

Unicorn meat is an Excellent Source of Sparkles!

I bet you don't get that from your bacon!

Re:This just in...

[AltairDusk]

I thought sparkles came from vampire meat?

Re:This just in...

[Aggrav8d]

You snuck restrictive licenses, closed markets, and numerous other evils past the open eyes of consumers...and then you fail to get your own shuriken onto your own airplane? White Ninja, you have greatly displeased your sensei! Seppuku is now your only option.

Thanks google

[geekoid]

Chrome has put a lot of pressure on MS for IE.

Re:Thanks google

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Now if they could just do the same thing for Windows itself...

Re:Thanks google

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they could just do the same thing for Windows itself...

There's obviously a lot of people on this site that have not used the most recent version of Windows or are running it on underpowered hardware. Your linuxes may run on old hardware fine, but they miss much of the polish and usability that a Windows machine has. Windows is also very consistent, whereas linux/gnu has almost no consistency across the platform and no standards of development for applications. It's an utter mess.

Re:Thanks google

[PhrozenOne]

Spot on!

Re:Thanks google

[DragonWriter]

Now if they could just do the same thing for Windows itself...

I think that's the plan...

Chrome:IE::ChromeOS:Windows

Re:Thanks google

[DragonWriter]

There's obviously a lot of people on this site that have not used the most recent version of Windows or are running it on underpowered hardware.

Yes, there are.

Your linuxes may run on old hardware fine,

Also, reasonably recent, inexpensive hardware, like my Atom N270 netbook (where, incidentally, Windows XP also runs fine.)

but they miss much of the polish and usability that a Windows machine has.

I've been using Ubuntu and Windows side by side for quite a long time on similar hardware. There isn't a giant difference in "polish", though Windows is generally a bit ahead in comparisons of contemporary versions.

Not enough to justify actually paying for a Windows upgrade from an older Windows version, though, so unless you are buying new hardware with Windows bundled at no additional cost compared to the same hardware without windows, the choice is between old Windows and current Linux (if you have to choose. OTOH, dual boot works fine.)

Windows is also very consistent

No, its not. Heck, Microsoft applications other than those bundled with the OS often don't even respect the UI conventions of the OS.

And third-party applications are all over the map.

whereas linux/gnu has almost no consistency across the platform and no standards of development for applications.

KDE and GNOME do have conventions as much as Windows does, and third-party apps are just as unlikely to follow them faithfully as on Windows.

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

I've been a long time Firefox user, and use it currently, but I wouldn't say I'm happy with it. There are a lot of problems with FF, the biggest being the many bugs they won't deal with. FF is not good, it is just the best of a bunch of bad choices IMO.

If IE9 starts rocking not only could I switch to it, but maybe it would provide the poke in the ass Firefox needs to get better.

Re:No kidding

[mrcleaver]

Why would you not switch to chrome? Is it because of certain addons?

I was a long time firefox user before switching to Chrome. I still occasionally use firefox due to firebug + other addons, but after using Chrome for a while firefox just feels sluggish as hell.

what's so stripped down about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

They crammed the tabs and address bar on the same line. That'll last 5 minutes before the user moves the tabs back down (if he/she can!) leaving the same interface as before.

Re:what's so stripped down about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you joking? Just look at this abomination, IE8: http://i55.tinypic.com/313lhms.png.

That doesn't even show the horror of its three command-bar menus, or right-click menu.

I visibly cringe every time I have to open IE8/below.

Re:what's so stripped down about that?

[Lord Byron II]

All of the wasted space at the top where the title bar should be is annoying. Imagine all those pixels gone on a netbook.

Re:what's so stripped down about that?

[SatanMat]

I don't have to.... Every time I use my iphone and scroll down the address bar disappears. I'm not saying safari on the iphone is anything great, just pointing out that it does just what you ask.... and yes, it is a neat trick. It would make surfing on any device that has a small screen more useable.

Re:what's so stripped down about that?

[Vegemeister]

But the stripped down interface should not be the default. Most people do have enough screen real estate for the standard toolbars, particularly if you use something like the Tree Style Tabs Firefox extension. As of late, Microsoft has developed a bad habit of releasing things with UIs that don't behave like a native Windows application. Every now and then, I have to do something with one of the newer versions of Office, and the only way I can get anything done is with keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, that means I'm limited to Open, New, Save, Exit, and Print.

Re:what's so stripped down about that?

[cbhacking]

Please send feedback about this. It annoys the hell out of me, and the more people complain the more likely they are to fix it. Tools menu (gear icon on the right, or tap Alt) -> Send Feedback.

Doesn't work with XP... so?

[hellfire]

I'm on XP and using Firefox. I use it for security, stability and extensibility. It's been doing remarkably well on all three fronts.

It's interesting how the browser wars are reverting back to the age old "I'm faster than you are" argument which was all but forgotten in general circles. People used to say which was faster, intel or PCC, Mac or Windows, and now it doesn't matter any more finally because you can't tell the difference when sending an email or working on a word document, and if you can tell, usually it doesn't make a difference. Sure, high end graphics and math work need to know which is faster, but exactly how many of us are doing that?

My perception is that the biggest thing MS is pushing on IE9 is the speed, and not pushing hard enough on security and stability. What good is a Corvette that can go 200+ when it's brakes are so bad they might kill you?

Re:Doesn't work with XP... so?

[revlayle]

Speed is certainly important... a primary bottleneck in many web 2.0 (or any heavy javascript apps) apps I help maintain is IE's pitiful performance. We can't force everyone off IE, esp. people who use our sites in the enterprise, or just do not know anything different than IE. IE 8 is tolerable, but a lot of people still use IE7 and even 6, unfortunately. I just wish IE9 was brought to XP.

Re:Doesn't work with XP... so?

[cbhacking]

Do you run as Admin? If so, you're throwing away far more security than you gain by using Firefox - IE7 on Vista (assuming patches are applied and UAC is enabled) is far more secure that a fully patched Firefox on XP running as Admin.

Even if you don't run as Admin, there's a lot of security features that XP just flat-out lacks. Claiming to use XP and claiming a reason that has anything to do with security is a self-contradictory statement.

Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time for a redesign of IE. Its clusterfuck of a UI has long been one of IE's big negative points, apart from insecurity and standards support. I might actually consider using it now, occasionally. First task: disable all IE plugins.

Correction

[TexasTroy]

"So, forget the performance and security boost, most enterprises and netbook users."

tabs on the same row as address bar

[spyked]

Am I the only guy who doesn't like this idea?

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[space_jake]

Looks like it could really crowded quickly. Not going to pass too much judgement till I see how it handles multiple tabs.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[catbutt]

And they leave a large amount of empty space above it....I suppose eventually there will be a title in that title bar, but currently it is just empty. Chrome does a much better job of making use of that space.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[AsmordeanX]

It handles multiple tabs about as poorly as you can expect it to. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars/2 (scroll about 1/2 way down)

Basically it just crowds out until the tabs are rendered useless then if helpfully puts scroll arrows after you can't read what's inside the tab anymore.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[StikyPad]

So, just like Chrome then.

Note, I love Chrome -- it's my browser of choice -- but tab management is not one of its redeeming qualities.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid that empty space will be left empty.

AFAIR (not on Vista/7 right now), explorer doesn't display a title in the title bar either. I have absolutely no clue what the motivation behind that is, though. Seems way stupid.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but once again the navigation button are spread out a far apart as they can get. Hmmm let's see let's put 2 buttons on the left, 2 in the middle and the rest way the fuck over on the right which includes the home button.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[cbhacking]

You can adjust the amount of space given to the bar vs. given to the tabs. This doesn't bother me that much, but if you want to option to change it back you should use the Submit Feedback tool (under Tools, the gear-shaped icon at the far right) to tell Microsoft this.

Re:tabs on the same row as address bar

[cbhacking]

Yeah, this really annoys me too. Submit Feedback, under the Tools menu (gear icon at far right, or tap Alt). The more people complain, the more likely they'll fix it.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

knee jerk, close minded, predetermined opinions are a cancer to this site...

M$ snubs XP ?

[gx5000]

No XP support ? Good luck with that......
Well it's no longer supported right ?
Still, not a good move....

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Abstrackt]

What part is not a good move? Not supporting XP anymore or not releasing software for an unsupported version of Windows?

"Want the latest and greatest IE? Upgrade Windows!" I'd say it's a good move.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[schnikies79]

XP is supported until 2014.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[ledow]

It's a good way to shift more customers to alternatives. I know that all the schools I've worked in, Firefox is compulsory because even the *thought* of updating IE or trying to move to 7 just to gain some small advantages and lose quite a lot of existing functionality / ease of use puts fears into the bursars.

Support XP and you could EASILY double the userbase of IE9. It shows what Microsoft is really after - not customers, but lock-in to ever-decreasing upgrades. My bursar promised to kill me if I end up needing something that HAS to have Windows 7 installed in the school to run. At least for the next few years. I similarly have a promise to hunt down any of my users who tries to fiddle with their desktop icons in order to restore IE access instead of Firefox.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's still supported. It's not developed for. When you buy a Windows version, you're not buying a lifetime contract for all /future/ software support. Are you bitches going to be complaining 10 years from now when Office 2020 doesn't support Windows 7? Buy it, pirate it, or stfu.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Abstrackt]

All good points. I was only thinking of end users when I made my original comment.

As for making people use Firefox: set the icon to IE, half your users won't even notice.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[VGPowerlord]

No XP support ? Good luck with that......
Well it's no longer supported right ?
Still, not a good move....

In the end, it boils down to Return on Investment. MS doesn't think they'll sell enough new copies of XP to justify backporting their hardware accelerated Direct2D/DirectWrite code to the older DirectDraw API.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[alen]

firefox 4 beta supports hardware acceleration only on DX10 which means no XP. technically you can run FF4 on windows 2000 when it comes out, but you will need Vista for the really good new features

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[PhrozenOne]

Actually there are NOT supporting XP, because in XP they can NOT take advantage of the GPU acceleration. I mean it was about time they dump XP, Vista and Vista SP3 ( aka win7 ) for the win!

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does Microsoft get grief for not supporting an OS released in 2001?

When Apple releases a new version of Safari, do they get criticized for not supporting it on OS X 10.1 Puma?

(I know, I know. Most installations of XP are at least up to SP2. Fine, I can upgrade my joke to OS X 10.3 Panther and have it still be applicable.)

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[ledow]

Yeah, because GPU's under Windows XP don't exist. And certainly NO-ONE is using GPU accelerated games under Windows XP. And hell, it isn't true that a huge proportion of serious gamers (say, those with Steam installed) use GPU acceleration with just about every chipset under Windows XP.

Nope. Totally impossible. No way they can use that general-purpose, platform-independent chip designed to accelerate graphics and other parallel tasks under an operating system that allows complete control of it, which has drivers for every major card from every serious graphics manufacturer, that's already used in acceleration of browser-based things across all platforms by their major competitor. Out of the question. Of course.

Stop believing their bullshit. IE9 doesn't use GPU acceleration not because it can't, not because it absolutely MUST have DirectX insert-stupid-number-here-that-was-artificially-bumped-when-we-dropped-XP-support-for-no-technical-reason, but because Microsoft just don't want it to. They want you to upgrade not only to their shiny new browser, but to their shiny new OS to use a browser. And MS are still selling HUGE numbers of XP licenses - just about every netbook that doesn't come with 7 comes with XP instead.

Back in my youth, an operating system didn't get in the way, was never seen and just did it's job. It genuinely didn't matter to the programs you ran whether you had DR DOS 1 or MS DOS 6.22 or 4DOS so long as the required libraries were around. MS were the ones who started the "Windows only works with OUR version of the OS" crap and have propogated that through to today. To me, an OS is, was, and always will be something that abstracts all the fancy hardware of a computer to a standardised interface that gets out of my program's way as much as possible.

Please stop confusing "If OS == XP and date > 2009 then print 'Upgrade' else run_program" hard-coded, bullshit checks with actually platform differences. It's the same way that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work on DR DOS, that ME could not run .NET properly (hardcoded check, where all OS before and after it worked fine), that XP can't run DirectX 10/11, or they can't put IE 9 onto XP. It's a hard-coded, conscious choice to obsolete their previous OS and it's starting to hit the wall for them because people are starting to realise that, actually, XP was probably the pinnacle of MS operating systems.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, it's a shame that Apple doesn't support Mac OS 9...

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just keep living back in the stone age. We don't miss chumps like you.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The current Firefox 4 nightlies and soon the beta releases will have compositing acceleration enabled by default. Compositing acceleration uses Direct3D 9 and works on Windows XP:

http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2010/09/15/testing-hardware-acceleration/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[mrcleaver]

I'm pretty sure it's because XP does not have the windowing manager Vista / 7 has, which turns the entire desktop into a Direct 3d rendering surface

The GDI / GDI+ interfaces that run in XP cannot take advantage of GPU acceleration, period.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Vegemeister]

No, infact. Windows XP sucks donkey balls in comparison to a modern operating system. The UI looks like either something drawn by a kindergartner or something from 1997, a situation which can only be rectified by boogering around with the innards of the OS or installing fly-by-night third party software with questionable license agreements.

There is no native desktop search. The ctrl-shift-n shortcut to create a new directory doesn't exist. There's not a convenient way to find the uptime of your system (unless you have professional edition). The memory manger swaps out user applications when you get up to go to the bathroom. And on top of all that, the godawful security model gives you the choice between doing your regular user business with root privileges or having to log out and disrupt currently running applications every time a program wants an update.

If you use your computer for gaming, either you are a masochist or your hardware is sufficient for Windows 7. If you use your computer for browsing, email, and desktop publishing, all of that can be done in Linux. If you use your computer for CAD, most of that software has a Unix or Linux version. If you use your computer(s) for batch processing, Linux is the obvious choice. If you are using legacy or low power portable hardware, there are a variety of lightweight window managers available. I have a 900 MHz Celeron which runs Xubuntu quite happily, and my sister is using a 450 MHz Pentium III, also with Xubuntu.

There really aren't many reasons to be running Windows XP in 2010. I am particularly puzzle by those people who insist on running 32 bit operating systems on 64 bit CPUs.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[aiht]

I think the 5-year gap in (consumer) Windows OS's after XP is part of it - it's not that it was released in 2001, it's that it was still the most recent version until near the end of 2006.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[cbhacking]

Extended Support is not really "supported" in the usual sense. Dangerous security bugs will be patched, but functionality bugs will not, and new features will not be backported - including IE, which is considered to be part of Windows (at least its rendering engine is).

In any case, it doesn't support WDDM, so you wouldn't get the full hardware acceleration anyhow.

Re:M$ snubs XP ?

[Haedrian]

But even without the HW acceleration you still have the new look, the security upgrades and whatever.

Oh mod me a troll BUT

[SmallFurryCreature]

Somehow I am not impressed when someone goes from absolute last to second last. It STILL is beaten by Opera, Chrome and Safari... so it beat Firefox which is the browser best known for its extensibility rather then speed by stripping itself down... So it becomes Chrome rather then Firefox, but then looses to Chrome.

oh, and it only work with hardware acceleration, only on windows and then only on recent versions of windows. ALL its competitors run on Windows XP with no trouble AND do it faster. So MS can't get a fast browser on its own OS THAT IT STILL SELLS!

My god, is our opinion of IE really THAT low that we find this impressive?

Oh and cue all the MS fanboys who will explain that IE9 can't run on XP because it needs X and yet all its competitors can do it. And run on Linux and OSX to boot...

IE is that special kid in class, who wins a price not for coming in first, but because everyone is special in their own way. Even if they eat the chalk.

MS, if you want to change the perceptions of your crappy software, do a FORCED upgrade on ALL your still used OS'es to IE9. Stop hiding behind excuses and repair the damage you did to paying customers with IE6. You got plenty of money to do it, so there are no excuses. Rid the world of IE6 and I might even buy an xbox... Nah

Re:Oh mod me a troll BUT

[Mongoose Disciple]

My god, is our opinion of IE really THAT low that we find this impressive?

I don't know if it (not that they're getting better speed, but the how of it) is so much impressive as it is interesting. We still can discuss interesting pieces of technology here, right? :)

Re:Oh mod me a troll BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

Couple things...
 
First, actual cost/benefit aside, there is a certain stigma against being the worst. Even if you're second to last, it's typically the worst option that catches the most flak. While everyone wants the best, what they're willing to accept is a whole other story. Most are willing to accept anything but the worst, believe it or not.
 
Second, Going from last place to second to last place may be a bigger jump than you give it credit for. Imagine a race, with 5 participants: 1st finishes in 10 seconds, 2nd in 12, 3rd in 12.5, 4th in 15, and 5th in 40. Jumping from last place to second to last place would require, in this case, shedding far more time than any other position jump (over 25 seconds as opposed to the narrowest gap, half a second between 2nd and 3rd). In this arbitrary example, that's also a higher percentage increase than any other position jump.
 
This may not be applicable, I admittedly don't know what benchmark was used to rank the browsers or where each scored in said benchmark, but without specific data it's not fair to say that a jump from last to second to last is a trivial improvement.

Re:Oh mod me a troll BUT

[Yvan256]

IE is that special kid in class, who wins a price not for coming in first, but because everyone is special in their own way. Even if they eat the chalk.

Are you saying that IE is the Ralph Wiggum of the web browsers?

Re:Oh mod me a troll BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference in the speed tests that people are doing is in milliseconds, and overall test suite differences in a few seconds, or even sub-seconds in a lot of cases (SunSpider). There are certainly areas that every other browser will beat IE9 in, but the reverse is also true. For instance, IE9 is significantly faster with screen rerendering on-the-fly (HTML5 Canvas features) than Chrome is--it's the difference between playable and not at all playable. IE9 is the reason that Firefox is implementing hardware acceleration, and it is the reason that Chrome 7 or Chrome 8 will have it.

It won't run on XP because it's no longer a supported operating system; it only still sold it because the OEMs kept pressure up to sell low cost, crappy XP systems. Similar to how Firefox is not setup to run on every old OS under the Sun--Microsoft has two consumer-level operating systems newer than XP. Sure, Firefox supports XP, but I cannot see many businesses not supporting XP as long as Microsoft does, so by Microsoft ending support, it allows other companies too as well, eventually leading people to upgrade to Windows 7, which is significantly improved for usability and stability.

I imagine the technical reason is that it requires DirectX features that do not exist on XP. Back-porting them would not only be a waste of their time, but just keep XP going for a few more years when it really does need to go to the wayside.

Guess you're just as pissed that Firefox raced to get their Firefox 4 beta out that included hardware support, but only on Windows... Nah.

Re:Oh mod me a troll BUT

[shutdown -p now]

IE is that special kid in class, who wins a price not for coming in first, but because everyone is special in their own way. Even if they eat the chalk.

Not quite. Rather, IE is 20 average kids in a class of 30. They win a cookie from the remaining bunch of 10 geeks for finally catching up, because it means that the geeks can now proceed further.

Stupid submitter.

[Spazntwich]

Three links to the same crappy site, and not a single one to Microsoft or a download link for IE9.

Let's have a little common courtesy here, submitters.

And it has amazing anti-tracking capabilities

[debus]

Oh never mind (this was ie8, but it lets you know what is important to them):

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/02/0036205/Microsofts-Ad-Team-Trumps-IE-Developers-Privacy-Aims

Yay!

[MonsterTrimble]

One big problem: It will not work on Windows XP. So, forget the performance and security boost, many enterprises and netbook users.

How is this a bad thing for us enterprise users? We'll get Opera/Chrome/Firefox that much faster! (I prefer Opera, but ANY of those three are a step up from Internet Explorer.

Yawn.

[thestudio_bob]

Wake me up when it scores 100% on the acid test.

Re:Yawn.

[VGPowerlord]

Wake me up when it scores 100% on the acid test.

It already does! On ACID 2.

Oh, you meant ACID 3?

IE9 Platform Preview 4 got a 96/100 score, with the last 4 points being in two technologies that MS considers "outdated."

Those would be:
SVG Fonts - replaced by Web Open Font Format (WOFF), submitted to W3C by Microsoft, Mozilla Corp, and Opera AB. Currently supported by Firefox 3.6+, IE9 Preview 3+, Webkit Nightly Builds (with Safari support coming sometime soon), and Google Chrome 5+. As of this time, Opera (10.62) does not support WOFF.

SVG SMIL animation - Won't support the current or previous versions (1.0-3.0). While annoying, it's not really a surprise, as SMIL is currently undergoing major revision: "the SVG WG intends to coordinate with the CSS WG to make some changes to animation and to extend filters. There's already work started to reconcile CSS3 animations and SVG." (Source)

Re:Yawn.

[thestudio_bob]

Zzzzzzzzzz....

Re:Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dipshit

Even worse, a major blow to HTML5

[Ilgaz]

If this thing doesn't run, even without the fancy GPU acceleration on XP, it means the web developers will still develop/test for IE 7/8. So, they won't use any of promised HTML5 features including HTML5/h264 video.

Degrade politely, browser capability detection etc. are meaningless. They don't do it. Basic as that.

If MS really wanted to compete, they would make it compatible with XP. Here comes the never ending saga of IE 7/8 updates/compatibility issues.

Re:Even worse, a major blow to HTML5

[shutdown -p now]

Even if it was released for XP, it would take a couple more years for enough people to migrate off IE9 to make ignoring those browsers feasible. By that time, XP will be overtaken by Win7, anyway - the trends are fairly clear on that.

Yeah, but...

[cdoggyd]

It's fast blah blah blah. It's elegant blah blah blah. IS IT SECURE YET?!?

IE9 ROCKS!

[PhrozenOne]

I have used every freaking browser that has ever been - IEx, FF and all the Gecko based, Chrome Safari and all the webkit based. But IE 9 *BETA* is amazing. Welcome back, Microsoft. I missed you. :)

I won't, so there!

[jd]

You made some good points, so I won't mod you troll. Nyah!

Seriously, FireFox should be faster than anyone else precisely because it is extensible. It only needs to load the code being used, so it doesn't need to have a footprint larger than necessary. It doesn't need to do behind-the-scenes housekeeping for routines that aren't in use. And so on. A totally modular browser should be faster than anyone else, in the same way that RISC is always faster than CISC, and stacking on top of a well-written underlying stack should give the same performance boost any hybrid RISC/CISC architecture would have.

IE's speedup is probably more to do with ripping out unnecessary code that churned cycles and hogged heap than to do with multi-core, so that it is faster by being lighter is no big deal. That it is faster than FireFox is actually disturbing, as it should not be possible to convert a monolithic design into a hybrid that is superior to a hybrid design that was that way from the start. The former will have inefficiencies due to constraints caused by assumptions in the original architecture, the latter should have no such limitations.

FireFox could easily be built with Silk++ (G++ with a few parallel keywords added) or with OpenMP extensions (although I'll be fair and say that's harder). That would cover all the multi-core aspects and would allow builds on single core machines on unextended compilers with zero overhead. FireFox could also be linked to libraries like liboil or other accelerator libraries as needed. This would give you hardware acceleration where the acceleration existed, or standard performance on unaccelerated systems.

Mind you, so could IE9. There is absolutely nothing to stop transparent acceleration. The libraries exist, the compilers exist, everything all these developers need exists. The only thing missing is the use of them. This would let you use IE9 on XP, you'd merely not get those performance enhancements that are in Windows 7. So why didn't Microsoft do this? (Obviously, to pressure XP users into downgrading.)

To me, the greatest stupidity of all is the refusal to use the tools that exist because... well, there isn't really a because. Silk++ added, what, three keywords? Oh the agony of learning! The pain! The pain! Soooo difficult! Since it's G++ with extensions, #define those keywords as nothing for basic compilers and the code will compile just as well but without the parallelization. No special code blocks for the different cases. I have a VERY hard time taking seriously any argument that says that parallelization would be hard work. Nor do I accept that finding these sorts of things is "difficult" - I find and list these kinds of projects on Freshmeat precisely so that you don't have to do the legwork. That part has already been done for you. If you're too godawful lazy to look at a single website, I don't see why I should be interested in what's produced.

(I'm no longer using FireFox, except for web testing via Selenium, because I do not - and will not - trust my computer to the incompetent. On Windows boxes, I refuse to use IE for the same reason. I'm seriously considering writing my own browser because at least I know it'll work and I know where I can find the toolkits I'd need.)

link tags

[VGR]

Can anyone confirm whether IE 9 supports '<link rel=prev ...>' and '<link rel=next ...>'? It seems like the vast majority of sites (and blog publishing software) don't bother to support these, and I get the feeling it's because the thinking has been, "Why bother with them if IE doesn't use them."

Re:link tags

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you download it and find out?

Probably missing DRM

[DBCubix]

IE9beta probably doesn't have the DRM loaded yet which gives it a speed advantage for now. We saw the same giant jumps in speed with Vista and Win7 betas until the DRM was added.

Re:Probably missing DRM

[cybrthng]

lol wut?

Kraken benchmark result

[edgrale]

I just ran the new Kraken benchmark released by Mozilla, result 48979.0ms +/- 2.8%.

Re:Kraken benchmark result

[edgrale]

For comparison same setup with Firefox 4 Beta 6 got 17568.9ms +/- 0.3%

Setup:
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz
4.00 GB RAM
Intel SSD 80GB G2

Sunspider results

[cybrthng]

A quick run of Sunspider performance results

http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B16,16,16,16,16%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B21,21,21,21,21%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B16,16,16,16,16%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B5,5,5,5,5%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B10,11,11,11,11%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B17,17,17,17,18%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B3,3,3,3,3%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B1,1,1,1,1%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B4,4,5,4,5%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B3,3,3,3,3%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B9,9,9,9,9%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B2,2,2,2,2%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B7,7,7,7,7%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B5,5,5,5,6%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B6,6,6,6,6%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B18,18,18,19,19%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B20,21,20,20,20%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B1,1,1,1,1%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B18,18,18,19,19%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B10,10,10,10,10%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B18,18,18,18,18%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B7,7,7,7,7%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B22,22,22,22,21%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B30,30,30,30,30%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B32,32,32,32,32%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B17,17,17,17,17%5D%7D

Sure

[Sycraft-fu]

System is a Core i7 860 (2.8GHz) 8GB RAM, a Radeon 5750 1GB. OS is Windows 7 64-bit, all patches current as of today. It is running the browser and Outlook, plus background apps so not a clean benchmark system but a pretty realistic light workload. Safari is not included because I am not willing to install all the system services they want to have.

Sunspider
---------
Firefox 3.6.9: 601.8ms +/- 1.0%
IE9 Beta: 291.6ms +/- 0.6%
Chrome 6.0.472.59: 215.8ms +/- 2.7%
Opera 10.62: 237.0ms +/- 1.5%

Kraken
------
Firefox 3.6.9: 13928.4ms +/- 0.5%
IE9 Beta: Fails to function properly.
Chrome 6.0.472.59: 12343.7ms +/- 0.6%
Opera 10.62: 10114.7ms +/- 0.5%

Peacekeeper
-----------
Firefox 3.6.9: 3612

Rendering 3050
Social networking 3109
Complex graphics 6482
Data 4819
DOM operations 3132
Text parsing 4300

IE9 Beta:3256 Has compatibility issues with their software to test the system which might cause results problems.

Rendering 2534
Social networking 1703
Complex graphics 7941
Data 6834
DOM operations 2530
Text parsing 4893

Chrome 6.0.472.59: 10988 Canvas results were visibly different from other browsers.

Rendering 7051
Social networking 6863
Complex graphics 21211
Data 23624
DOM operations 8173
Text parsing 17145

Opera 10.62: 11510

Rendering 11900
Social networking 8471
Complex graphics 18830
Data 8937
DOM operations 10291
Text parsing 21797

I would caution against taking any of this too seriously for actual browser performance. The first two tests are 100% synthetic, no rendering at all, and the Futuremark test is rather strange and artificial, as their tests usually are (their graphics card benchmarks are notorious for not reflecting how GPUs work in the real world).

For useful tests you need something that is testing actual pages rendering how someone would actually use things. Video playback, an interactive game, etc. All these benchmarks strike me as contrived, not realistic.

Re:Sure

[cbhacking]

What was your problem on Kraken? IE9 didn't do well (mostly due to a really bad Gaussian Blur score, though a poor Beat Detection score didn't help either - the rest were well in line with other browsers) but it passed the test fine.

For the record, Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz laptop, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 9600 GS (512MB VRAM), Win7 x64: 51511.8ms +/- 0.2%. 40% of that was the Gaussian Blur test (20637.3ms +/- 0.4%) which seems to be the major outlier.

Re:Sure

[Sycraft-fu]

It just stalled out and I had to kill it. It seemed to run the first test, but won't go on beyond that. I wasn't going to spend a long time troubleshooting it. This process took long enough and I'm not being paid for it or anything.

Another ugly stripper?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this stripper will not look like that ugly bitch from last year.

I ran PeaceKeepr and SunSpider

[PhrozenOne]

I just benchmarked the new IE9 beta ( I am loving the new look :) )

Hardware Information:
Core 2 duo e5300 @ 2,6GhZ,XFX ATI Radeon 4770 512 MB DDR5, 2x2 GB A-DATA@800MhZ, Gigabyte Ep45 UD3P mobo, WD Black 640 GB

Software information:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64,
started programs during benchmark: Skype, MS OneNote, BitDefender 2011, about 20 IE9 tabs

Results

Sun Spider:
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B19,18,18,18,18%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B25,23,24,24,23%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B19,19,19,19,20%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B6,6,6,6,6%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B13,14,12,13,13%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B20,21,20,20,20%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B3,3,3,3,3%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B2,2,2,2,2%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B6,5,5,6,5%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B4,4,4,4,5%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B11,11,10,11,11%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B3,3,3,2,3%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B8,8,8,8,9%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B6,6,6,6,7%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B8,7,7,7,7%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B24,23,24,24,24%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B24,24,24,27,24%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B1,1,1,1,1%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B22,21,21,22,21%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B11,11,11,11,11%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B26,25,25,24,24%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B8,9,9,8,8%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B24,24,23,23,23%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B34,33,34,33,63%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B39,39,39,38,39%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B22,22,22,22,22%5D%7D

Kraken

No results, it waited for about 10 minutes, but the test just stops at one point and starts all overa again, just like in a loop.

PeaceKeeper

2521 Points
Rendering 2197
Social Networking 1309
Complex Graphics 6245
Data 5317
DOM Operations 1811
Text Parsing 3681

biased much?

[Anonymous Coward]

You nerds wont cut MS a break on anything will you....

Re:Here's to hoping.. Oblig car analogy

[bigrockpeltr]

Chrome/Safari/etc... -- turbocharged 2.0L highly tuned Jap engine
IE9 -- 6.0L American muscle car

both are fast... one (set) is efficient

Improvement?

[gmuslera]

Is not for XP, so maybe unless you are using Windows 7, how much forcing to use Windows Vista for it is an improvement in performance?

Hard update to get beta in test

[Fri13]

I dont know about speed, but I find it funny that Google got Microsoft on their knees with Google Chrome. Microsoft made almost 100% copy from Google Chrome, like almost all of the web browser manufacturers.

I had hard times to get this IE9 beta installed as I did not have all updates installed what it demanded. And the download page what offered all three updates what I needed, one was Windows6.0-KB971512-x86. For windows 7 what use NT 6.1 operating system, the update is wrong as it is for NT 6.0 operating system. I needed to search longer to find out the update what was missing and it was a Windows6.1-KB2028551-v2-x86. So the update list what IE9 beta offers has wrong link.

But I must say that the IE now looks much better. By default the statusbar is hidden and the back/forward buttons are easier to use when they follow the Mozilla style. And possibility to resize the addressbar | Tabs position is good as well.

And now when Microsoft toke as well the quicklist of most used sites, what Opera offered, then Apple toke it to Safari, IE9 actually feels good by default.

If Microsoft would have done all this 5 years ago, all competitors would have been in deep ****

Re:Hard update to get beta in test

[mrcleaver]

There were no competitors for IE back then and the entire market stagnated under ie 6. Thank god for competition, from Microsoft, Google or otherwise.

Re:Hard update to get beta in test

[Fri13]

Yes there were competitors. Firefox and Opera and even few others. But they were not so well know among normal people at 2001-2003 time. 2003-2006 the other competitors started to rise as XP was having lots of security problems and if IE would been like IE8 by security and like IE9 by usability, others would not have had a change.

Chrome Frame is made for intranet IE6 traps

[rsborg]

Google offers a "Chrome Frame" plug-in for IE that renders pages with WebKit instead of MSHTML if they opt in ...

This is the perfect conditions under which we can "support" those recalcitrant but politically powerful users who can't be bothered to switch to Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

I switched our web server to inject this tag on all pages, and also a alert banner based on browser detection (IE < 8, without Chrome Frame) on all pages that tell the user "Your experience can be improved if you install Chrome Frame".

Complaints about how our site renders improperly... have all but disappeared... Thanks Google for giving me a way to break the rusty bear-trap that is IE6.

"Setup required a reboot"

[d1g1t4l]

I stopped reading the review after that! A browser installation requires a reboot to work, That doesn't sound right! Microsoft software engineers must really love to reboot their computers.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[weicco]

Oh! The most dreaded reboot! I don't want these reboots on my fricking computer. I just turn it off for the night and boot it in the morning and that's that, but no reboots for me. No way.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[thoromyr]

You laugh, but rebooting is a considerable pain for me. I use my computer to get work done -- that's why I run linux. Even at work, where I relegated windows to a vm so that I could get some stability. A lot of my work is browser based, I often have multiple firefox windows open and at least one will usually have 30+ tabs. Then there are the multiple SSH sessions with remote applications showing the windows on my desktop (Yes, I love X Windows).

Browsers deal with the multiple tabs as best they can, but when I close a browser I can't have it simply remember the tabs and reopen them. I use a variety of web applications and in some cases this causes reposting of actions. Blame the web developer all you want, but it remains a problem for me.

Once I've gotten logged into a dozen systems, each as a different user with decent password I don't want to go through that again if I can help it. Yes, I use certs where I can, but that isn't all of the systems *and* doesn't address the loss of the X sessions on reboot. Obviously I never log out either, except to reboot.

So, yeah, reboots are rather annoying to me. Windows with the "minimum one reboot each month" was a real pain, not to mention that X windows on MS Windows isn't all that stable. I'm not obsessive and don't keep track of my uptimes, but I can say with certainty that the only reboots I get are for kernel updates and power outages (no UPS at work, at home I have better uptime).

Back to the main topic, the only time a reboot should be required is a kernel update, and I seriously doubt IE 9 patches the kernel. Reboot to install a browser? Insane.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[mrcleaver]

Kind of an interesting note, I just recently updated Firefox to the latest version, and for some reason the latest update wanted me to restart my computer.

I didn't read it wrong, it wasn't restart the browser, it was restart the computer.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[aiht]

Kind of an interesting note, I just recently updated Firefox to the latest version, and for some reason the latest update wanted me to restart my computer.

I didn't read it wrong, it wasn't restart the browser, it was restart the computer.

Was this on Windows or Linux (or other...)?
Sometimes* Windows doesn't want to replace an exe or dll because it's already in use, so schedules it to happen on the next reboot.
Maybe it was that?

* i.e. I can't tell why it does it in some cases and not others.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[aiht]

Back to the main topic, the only time a reboot should be required is a kernel update, and I seriously doubt IE 9 patches the kernel. Reboot to install a browser? Insane.

I can't find a reference, but I believe IE has been known to patch the kernel from time to time.
And considering the things that are implemented in the kernel, it's not so surprising.
Of course, Windows also isn't so good with replacing executable files that are still loaded, so it doesn't quite reach the ideal state of "only time a reboot should be required is a kernel update" anyway. But I suspect you know that.

Re:"Setup required a reboot"

[BZ]

Installing Safari on Mac also requires a reboot, and for the same reason. In both cases, the thing being installed isn't just a browser but also an update for the OS-default html-rendering dynamic library. Which means that suddenly any running applications that might be using that library need to be restarted, etc.

Explaining all that to users is a pain, so Apple and Microsoft just force a reboot.

Stripped-down or beefed-up?

[Type44Q]

In other news, a full-size school bus equipped with a 5000hp jet turbine is now faster than a Honda Civic...

"It's even integrated into Windows 7"

[TheDarkener]

Wow, what a feature! Oh wait. Hold on, DOJ is on the phone.

I'd Be willing to Bet...

[rshol]

... that today, more people will write more words in a Web Browser than in a Word Processing program. And MS does not think its a good idea to include a spell checker in IE.

XP is really old...FF doesn't run on old Mac OSs

[klubar]

I can't install the recent versions of FF or Safari on a version of the Mac OS (OS 10.3) that is much more recent than XP. It seems that MS does a better (if not perfect) job of supporting its older OSs than others. At some point, the support costs become too high to back port everything, and from a business decision not having IE9 available for XP may encourage others to upgrade to W7. (And selling W7 is where MS will make money.) BTW... W7 is a really good OS.

One print page.

[antdude]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9185338/Internet_Explorer_9_beta_strips_down_for_speed?taxonomyName=Internet&taxonomyId=167

nyuck

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Microsoft but you chose to spell it with a dollar sign... brilliant. Quip, quip says you!

Flash "Square"

[janisozaur]

Adobe released their new flash version to fit in ie9 nicely. There is also native 64-bit version for all three platforms. Betanews article on this: http://www.betanews.com/article/Adobe-launches-Square-Flash-Player-preview-adds-IE9-64bit-OS-support and download site: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

chrome lookalike

[Gerard Ketuma]

isn't it ironical how IE9 looks like chrome interface. finally they are getting rid of all those menu bars. seems like google should have requested a patent on minimal web browser interface. they will have received one issued in Eastern Texas.

waste of space

[Max_W]

Why IE tabs are so ridiculously enormous and take that much space for nothing? We do have sites where there are interesting things, believe it or not, and we do not need 7% of the screen taken by empty gray space.

Re:waste of space

[Lose]

Don't worry. Cuz just like Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 was your idea. (tm)

Not really.

[anUnhandledException]

For the purpose of IE "uptake" what matters is unique computers connected to the internet.

Windows ~92
Mac OS ~5%
Linux ~1%
Other ~2% (combined)

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

Hell not supporting XP (~60% of global market) is more of hindrance to IE 9 adoption than anything else.

What about KDE/Konqueror? (NT)

[IYagami]

KDE is multiplatform (OS and hardware...)

Targeting other browser users.

[Lose]

I downloaded the IE9 beta and played around with it a bit (infact I am posting this with it now). I still prefer Chrome. Additionally, I noticed the interface IE9 uses is not too dissimilar from Chrome's, and has a hint of Firefox likeness with its much largely inflated back button/small button combo. Coincidence?

Re:XP is really old...FF doesn't run on old Mac OS

[JackieBrown]

I can't install the recent versions of FF or Safari on a version of the Mac OS (OS 10.3) that is much more recent than XP. It seems that MS does a better (if not perfect) job of supporting its older OSs than others.

The latest version of IE on Mac OS is 5.0. Firefox dropped support long after MS did

Browsers are applications not operating systems

[desmond1897]

I just don't understand why the browser, an application that is supposed to run *within* an operating system, needs to commandeer CPU or GPU resources on its own from an operating system whose main role is to manage those very resources. Isn't this a confusion of roles? Won't it simply complicate the development process (and increase its cost) for rival browsers? But I guess that's the intent.

Re:Browsers are applications not operating systems

[BZ]

IE9 is "commandeering" GPU resources by using Direct3D and Direct2D. Those happen to be APIs the operating system provides through which you can do drawing in a way that makes it easy for the operating system to allocate GPU resources to support the drawing operations. Your other option is to not use those APIs, and either do the work yourself (on the CPU, since your process doesn't have direct access to the GPU, obviously) or call some other OS APIs which may or may not use the GPU for the work, depending on how well the API maps to what the GPU wants to see.

Doesn't seem like there's any confusion of roles here....

Share figures

[symbolset]

Not supporting XP shuts out at least half of the current installed base. IE9 only runs on Vista and 7, and it doesn't come preinstalled on either one. At last report even when IE's preinstalled so thoroughly it can't be removed, it's not used half the time so at most the upside right now is 25%. Long uphill climb for this one, as IE share continues its slow decline in general. IE9 is not what it takes to drive W7 adoption amongst the XP installed base.

And before you tell me XP is old... it's still selling on new machines today, and it will remain available under downgrade rights for two full years after the release of the next full version of Windows. It's not going away quickly. XP has a long tail.

So yeah, even though "Cross Platform" does not mean "runs on all the current versions of Windows", IE9 doesn't even do that. Now let's talk about mobile...

Only runs on Vista+

[YoshiDan]

Thanks for screwing so many people over Microsoft. Too many people are using XP to just drop support for it. Only just got my boss to approve an upgrade to Adobe CS5, and now I have to ask for an upgrade to windows 7 so that I can make sure our website is ie9 ready. This is should be great fun!

Re:XP is really old...FF doesn't run on old Mac OS

[Morty]

The most important date for support is the last-ship date, not the first-ship date. It doesn't matter how long the product has been out, it matters how recently customers bought it.

And guess what? XP is still shipping -- the current end-of-sale date is October 22, 2010. OS X 10.3 stopped shipping years ago. MSFT's official policy is to support XP until 2014. Why doesn't this include IE9?

[I am about to lose a mod point I just spent. But I couldn't let this go. Bah.]

Firefox hardware acceleration is only in 7/Vista

[judeancodersfront]

XP doesn't have Direct2D.
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

So what if XP was dropped for DX10? Should they be supporting gamers on 98 as well? Supporting multiple platforms costs money, and since XP has inferior security I'm glad they are encouraging upgrades. If you don't like MS then you should be glad they aren't bringing IE9 to XP since it means less competition for competing browsers.

Yani's Speed Test (AKA -- Eat Shit MS)

[akayani]

Computer -- AMD 64 X4 core / 8Gb RAM

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results
IE9 64bit -- Total: 1882.4ms +/- 3.3%
Minefield (FF Nightly) -- Total: 509.8ms +/- 3.9%

Acid 3
IE9 64bit -- 95
Minefield (FF Nightly) -- 98

Dar DA!

ahem

[AlgorithMan]

1. it would not be the first time that microsoft left out security features in beta versions to show off performance that the final cannot reach
2. all modern browsers compile javascript to bytecode
3. a rendering engine does not become better by utilizing more hardware ressources (by that logic i could improve the quality of my sourcecodes by buying a faster CPU)