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: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".