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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."
...who strip down for speed, dope, blow, and whatnot.
I don't go near any of them, either.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Internet Explorer 9 Reviewed, Benchmarked
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:
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?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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!
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.
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.
Am I the only guy who doesn't like this idea?
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).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
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
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
XP is supported until 2014.
Gone!
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.
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.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Efficiencies can be found by optimizing the workflow in which case IE 9 optimally takes advantage of GPU or multiple cores for better performance.
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.
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.
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.
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.