Microsoft Aims To Close Performance Gap With Internet Explorer 9 477
Barence writes "Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers. The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance. 'We're changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers,' explains Internet Explorer's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch. As well as improving performance, Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces."
Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:4, Interesting)
The ACID conformance is still at a dismal 30% compared to 90% of chrome, Safari and Opera.
The internet willstill be divided into 2 - the Microsoft world and the Real, Normal world.
Shame, really. So many years, and the leopard has yet to change its spots.
Re:IE (Score:3, Interesting)
The speed problem with IE is NOT rendering! The issue is with the kludge design for multiple-tabbed browsing - which does the equivalent of starting an entire, new environment and plug-in set, etc for every tab!
This may be the best trade-off for the 3-4 tab user. Beyond this? Awful. More than 10 seconds to switch between tabs, when - as I often do - there are 12 - 20 opened.
Don't talk to me about the brain-dead session @restore@ feature.
"will tap the power of the PC's graphics card..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is another way of saying that IE9 will be such a resource hog that even the highly advanced eight core systems we'll be using in a few years will not be powerful enough to run it.
Re:Sub Pixel rendering, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read that as him saying that the Direct2D sub-pixel rendering is more accurate (more aesthetic?) than the current GDI implementation.
Me too. But what does this tell you about the priorities at the IE team when this is something worth bragging about?
More Exploits (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IE (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the price you pay for having each tab run in a separate process? Part of my frustration with firefox is that a crash in one tab brings the whole thing down. I use IE for a handful of sites that won't run in firefox, so I don't have first-hand experience. Is IE 8 able handle crashes in one tab without the rest crashing as well?
Re:IE (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Forget performance (Score:4, Interesting)
I was gonna call bullshit but I opened Chrome here and Firefox with the same pages loaded. Firefox actually used less memory. Now that's not a scientific test or anything but it's enough for me.
I'm gonna mark this day on a calendar because this is fucking incredible.
Re:Forget performance (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome does a much, much better job with memory handling, and Chrome does in fact have addons that are equivalent to NoScript and AdBlockPlus.
I agree that Chrome does a better memory handling, but its CPU usage (100% of a dual core) is prohibitive when you are running other applications. This is why I continue to use Firefox.
My problem with Chrome and other webkit browsers in Windows is that their non-javascript rendering is much slower than Opera, FF, and IE. Scrolling a long page in a forum drives me crazy with Chrome/Safari. Opera, surprisingly (to me), won my last rendering comparison by a significant margin, followed by the acceptable FF and IE (well, IE was acceptable in terms of rendering speed, not overall). With an i7 system, 8 gigs of RAM, and a high end gaming video card I shouldn't feel like running webkit is like running Quake at 1280x1024 on my 486 without a 3d accelerator. However, I recognize that I'm a lot more sensitive to that sort of performance issue than are most.
Re:Quote correction (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an excellent point. I'm assuming the web developer, however, would not have access to the API directly.
If they do, then, damn, talk about vendor lock-in. IE9 would become the new IE6, with anyone stupid enough to deploy its full feature set locked to only having customers who have IE9.
But I have to assume that Redmond learned their lesson on this one, and has insulated the DirectX API calls to "stuff that happens in rendering standard HTML", and not "web developer can send DirectX commands straight to the graphics engine".
Because if it's the latter, I don't WANT better performance. More importantly, I don't want some Nigerian web developer having a passthru to DirectX via my browser. ActiveX is bad enough...
Re:Help with history (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the W3C and IE appeared almost contemporeously with each other, so there wasn't much in the way of actual web (as opposed to network) standardisation at the time. In fact, the W3C was created to combat the existing standards-free mess. Microsoft's disregard for the growing standardisation of the web over the coming years was a serious issue, and a disincentive for other browsers to standardise, but it's not like they blundered into a divine and well-defined web and made a mess of it.
Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:3, Interesting)
Neat.
- My Firefox 3.0 passed all except ACID3 (stopped at 73).
- K-MELEON - Major fail on Acid2 and 3. I'm deleting this off my hard drive.
-
- Opera 10 passed 100% with only a slight error on ACID1 (bar maids was off by 1 pixel). Yay Opera!
- Links - uh - no
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- Cingular (C64) - failed ACID3
- iBrowse (Amiga) - ditto
Re:Help with history (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny how strongly stating things as if they were facts doesn't actually make them facts.
Internet Explorer first shipped in Aug 1995.
HTML 2.0 became a standard in Dec of 1995.
CSS1 became a standard in Dec. of 1996.
IE reached its peak market share in 2003 with IE6 (which released in 2001)
The current darling of the world, CSS2.1 became a standard in 2004.
(Hint: The dates with the bigger numbers mean that they came *after* the dates with the smaller numbers)
Re:Help with history (Score:4, Interesting)
The W3C was almost irrelevant in the period when Netscape was the dominant browser. Netscape did whatever the hell it wanted (tables, frames), and the W3C was constantly playing catchup with them.
The major break was when Netscape pushed "JavaScript Style Sheets" over CSS and "Layers" over the W3C DOM.
Internet Explorer 4 contained preliminary versions of the W3C CSS and DOM standards. Yes they were incomplete and buggy and extended, but without them the W3C probably would have faded away completely.
When Mozilla came out, it was far more compatible with IE than it was with previous versions of Netscape.
Re:Here's an abbreviated history (Score:1, Interesting)
once they owned the browser market, they did nothing to improve it.
That's not entirely true. They created a few new technologies to support other products that they had. For instance, they created the XMLHttpRequest concept to enable the web version of Outlook. They didn't submit it to standards bodies or document/publicize it very much, but they created it and when it finally got noticed, it sparked the AJAX fad.
You can say they did little to improve it, but saying nothing is a bit of an exaggeration.