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Comments: 477 +- Technology: Microsoft Aims To Close Performance Gap With Internet Explorer 9 on Thursday November 19, @10:03AM
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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."
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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:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more because people just don't care.
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You're right. (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as web developers will keep supporting non-standards-compliant garbage like IE the users won't care.
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Further: (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as IE has a majority of the market, whatever IE does is the effective web standard, regardless of what any standards body has to say.
(Note, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but I'm pragmatic.)
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Funny)
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.
So buy a snow leopard instead....
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people realise how stupid benchmarks are, yet parrot on about ACID all day?
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Informative)
"Acid3 [acidtests.org] is the third in a series of test pages written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.
Acid3 is primarily testing specifications for “Web 2.0 dynamic Web applications. Also there
are some visual rendering tests, including webfonts. Here is the list of specifications tested:
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Re:Performance gap but not Conformance gap (Score:5, Funny)
Why do people realise how stupid benchmarks are, yet parrot on about ACID all day?
I don't like tomatoes, but I like unit testing. I thought I'd mention that as long as we're tossing out non-sequiturs.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The standards were an attempt to provide a clear sensible path going forward, not to codify the garbage as it was.
Re:Help with history (Score:4, Informative)
Because Microsoft didn't invent the Internet. As a matter of fact they were very late to the game.
MOSAIC was first, then Mozilla/Netscape. Microsoft realized very late that the Internet was going to be important and threw something together.
The standards had already been well under way by the time Microsoft got into the game.
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Re:Help with history (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft licensed the NCSA/spyglass MOSAIC which was the dominant browser at that time (1993-94).
Then Microsoft got sued for giving-away the browser for free and thus not making royalty payments to NCSA/Spyglass (no sales==no profit sharing). Microsoft used its economic muscle to force Spyglass to accept 8 million dollars in one-time payment, and kept the code for themselves.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. "Business is war." - Jack Tramel
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Re:Help with history (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong. When web standards started, MS had 0% of the market share. Internet Explorer did not yet exist. The standards were there first; MS decided not to support them.
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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.
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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.
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Here's an abbreviated history (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong. MS was a huge supporter of web standards back in the mid to late nineties, back when they were the underdog browser. They were extremely active in the development of XML, HTML4, DOM, and CSS. They proposed and implemented VML, which was combined with PGML to produce SVG. They were the first to begin implementations of numerous standards, including DOM, CSS and SMIL. That's a big part of why Microsoft won the first browser war; because they had a genuinely superior product to Netscape.
In 1997 Netscape started development on Gecko, in an attempt to leapfrog Microsoft's Trident engine. The problem is that Netscape couldn't get a product to market in a reasonable amount of time. Without a competitor, Microsoft took over the market, peaking at 95% share in 2003. The die was cast in 2000, however, when Microsoft saw that they'd won browser war. That's when they started moving IE into maintenance, and migrating the top developers over to .NET. This left the web stagnating for years with partially implemented standards and no viable competitor to IE.
Fast forward to late 2004, and Mozilla finally had a polished product built on Netscape's Gecko engine. Firefox emerged as a genuinely superior product to IE, and Mozilla relentlessly proclaimed the web standards mantra. They chipped away at Microsoft's market share until Firefox reached around 10% at the end of 2005. Meanwhile, companies like Google provided really compelling services based on the web standards supported by Firefox, and eventually other browsers. And of course, there were all the security fumbles with IE, while the competing browsers were (mostly undeservedly) considered safer. At that point, Microsoft finally got worried and pulled IE out of maintenance in early 2006.
So, now IE is back in active development, and MS is returning to the features they started roughly a decade ago, which places them well behind competitors like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. And Microsoft still doesn't consider IE to be a very important product, because the team today is just a shadow of what they were at their peak in the nineties. That's why the improvements are progressing so slowly, and they're continuing to lag even farther behind the competition. Meanwhile they're hemorrhaging market share at a rate of about 7% per year.
TL;DR: MS cared about standards until they were on top; once they owned the browser market, they did nothing to improve it. Now that they're losing the market, they're making a half-hearted attempt to compete again.
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Re:Here's an abbreviated history (Score:4, Informative)
>>>MS was a huge supporter of web standards back in the mid to late nineties, back when they were the underdog browser.
Not true. W3C has been criticizing Microsoft since day 1 for not following their recommendations. (They also criticized Netscape.)
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>>>That's a big part of why Microsoft won the first browser war; because they had a genuinely superior product to Netscape.
I don't agree, but even if we assume IE was better, the MAIN reason it "won" was because IE was free and Netscape cost $30 at the time (I remember; I paid to get the shiny new Navigator 3 in a box). Free almost always wins in a battle.
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Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet! I can't wait to replace Firefox on my MacBook Pro and my desktop Ubuntu box with this, it will run awesome on those! I wonder when I'll be able to get AdBlock for it?
JS performance (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardware acceleration of text and pictures is one thing. Javascript performance is quite another. What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine. Two school computers, one running Chrome (out of my home directory - bad sysadmin!) and the other running IE8, have very obvious differences in their Javascript speed on a benchmarking test (Sunspider, FYI). (They're school computers, their hardware should be exactly the same, their uptime should be exactly the same, etc. etc.)
So, where is Microsoft going in this category?
Re:JS performance (Score:5, Informative)
> Two things surprised me here. One is that Chrome and Safari are 3x faster than FF
There are a few things going on here:
1) The public sunspider benchmark has a bug in that it uses a Spidermonkey-specific
extension in one of the tests that slows it down in Firefox only. Apple has fixes the
bug in their revision control system but is refusing to push the fix out to the public
site.
2) Chrome and Safari are in fact faster on sunspider than Firefox. Firefox is up to 5x
faster on other JS benchmarks. Depending on exactly what you're doing, you might have
better performance with one or the other.
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With a fast CPU and a dual GPU setup... (Score:4, Funny)
...users will finally be able to browse the Crysis website with acceptable framerates.
Add-On System (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah I also want working keyboard shortcuts.
Re:Add-On System (Score:5, Funny)
IE also has a lot of add ons. Browse the web with it for a while and you will effortlessly collect lots of them.
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"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.
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Now it will incorrectly render my pages twice as fast!
Seriously, IE has become a verb with me and my web developer friends. We even use it in general conversation: "That guy cut me off and I told him to go IE himself."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, now I'm a database developer.
IE is also an injection (Score:5, Funny)
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More Exploits (Score:5, Interesting)
Resolution independence (Score:5, Insightful)
I look forward more to resolution independence [wikipedia.org]. It would REALLY nice to express a picture or font's width in terms of screen (or table) proportion, instead of pixels (ugh).
It would save everyone so much time. Let's hope super-super high resolution monitors (OLED anyone?) come shortly to make this more of a reality.
How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Spell check is not a luxury, its a necessity
For those who can't spell.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But hey, that's a view that's not rabidly anti-Microsoft...
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?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Subpixel rendering (turning on or off R,G,B elements) is a cool concept. It almost makes me want to give-up my CRT for an LCD. Almost. In reality my eyes can't see those pixels smaller than 1024x800 resolution, so it makes no difference anyway. And I can't believe we're now on IE9. I just upgraded to version 7 last month! Next you're going to tell me XP-SP2 is not the latest OS. ;-)
Aside -
I just tried the K-MELEON web browser for a few weeks. I don't recommend it. Despite claims that it's
Re: (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.
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?
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Re:IE (Score:5, Informative)
> Is this the price you pay for having each tab run in a separate process?
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
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Re:IE (Score:4, Funny)
That depends on the OS.
You do have a point there. But I can count on 1 finger how many OS's Microsoft is targeting with IE.
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Re:IE (Score:5, Informative)
When we talk about process creation being expensive, as opposed to thread creation, we're usually talking about it taking milliseconds rather than microseconds. From the perspective of the computer, process creation is expensive, and that means we can't use software design which relies on rapidly creating new processes, but if we're talking about the creation of a SINGLE process to service a new tab, it's absofuckinglutely irrelevant. From a user perspective, 1ms might as well be 1us. They both fall into the 'imperceptibly short' bin.
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Re:IE (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
Please, when you get into the multiple seconds range, you are WELL beyond any OS process creation overhead...
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Re:IE (Score:4, Informative)
The performance really depends on the browser's architecture, which is comprised of a lot of parts and potential bottlenecks.
Chrome and Chromium, for example, are heavily multi-processed and handle large amounts of tabs\plugins very nicely. It certainly doesn't hurt that they were designed from the ground up for this kind of behavior.
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Re:IE (Score:5, Informative)
> The issue is with the kludge design for multiple-tabbed browsing - which does the equivalent of starting an entire, new environment and plug-in
You mean like Chrome does? That's the BEST feature of IE8 - no more one-tab crashing taking down all yoru other tabs with more basic browsers like IE7 and Firefox.
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Re:god help us all (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, why does Explorer (not IE, just basic file list explorer) take up 40 Meg? What on earth is it doing with all that memory just to display a list of files?
Re:Forget performance (Score:5, Funny)
Uh... you're in the wrong place. This is where we bitch about IE, not Firefox.
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Re:Forget performance (Score:4, Informative)
Most Firefox memory issues since 3.x are due to bad extensions, not the core browser. Firefox is doing well with memory nowadays. I've had 2 windows, one of which has anywhere from 2 to 20 tabs in it, running all week on XP SP3, and haven't noticed any slowdowns.
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Webkit has some leaks too. Not to the extent that Firefox seems to, but they do add up over a few weeks. Chrome may be able to get around this by killing off a process (and releasing leaked memory) when you close a tab so you just have to close tabs instead of the whole browser.
Still, it's an issue that can be improved upon.
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.
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