IE 9 Beta Strips Down For Speed 288
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."
I know other whores... (Score:5, Funny)
...who strip down for speed, dope, blow, and whatnot.
I don't go near any of them, either.
Re:I know other whores... (Score:4, Informative)
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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?
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I dunno, I think you nailed it.
(And the answer is "yes"...)
Here's to hoping (Score:2)
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...
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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 actu
Re:Here's to hoping (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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?
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Does it mean websites can now exploit bugs in the Ring-0 graphics driver as well as all those other things?
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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?
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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
Re:Here's to hoping (Score:4, Informative)
Efficiencies can be found by optimizing the workflow in which case IE 9 optimally takes advantage of GPU or multiple cores for better performance.
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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?
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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 chang
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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."
No kidding (Score:2)
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.
Oh mod me a troll BUT (Score:5, Insightful)
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
I won't, so there! (Score:2)
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
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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? :)
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Are you saying that IE is the Ralph Wiggum of the web browsers?
Re:Here's to hoping (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Chrome Frame is made for intranet IE6 traps (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Chr
Just released where? (Score:2)
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
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http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ [beautyoftheweb.com] (seriously)
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All i see there is 9/15/10 :)
Another hour i guess we'll see the downloads
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A Fuller review, with benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)
request to the peanut gallery: (Score:2)
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:
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.
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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
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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.
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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 [mozilla.com]
Google Chrome 6.0.472.59 Beta [mozilla.com]
Mozilla Firefox 4 beta 6 [mozilla.com]
Sunspider results (Score:2)
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 [webkit.org]
Sure (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
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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!
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"unicorn bacon"
But bacon is already magical! What could unicorn possibly add?
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Unicorn meat is an Excellent Source of Sparkles! [thinkgeek.com]
I bet you don't get that from your bacon!
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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".
Thanks google (Score:2)
Chrome has put a lot of pressure on MS for IE.
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Now if they could just do the same thing for Windows itself...
Doesn't work with XP... so? (Score:2)
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,
Even worse, a major blow to HTML5 (Score:2)
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.
tabs on the same row as address bar (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:tabs on the same row as address bar (Score:5, Informative)
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 [arstechnica.com] (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.
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Stupid submitter. (Score:2)
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.
Yay! (Score:2)
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. (Score:2)
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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 [wikipedia.org] (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 (
IE9 ROCKS! (Score:2, Funny)
link tags (Score:2)
Kraken benchmark result (Score:2)
I just ran the new Kraken benchmark released by Mozilla, result 48979.0ms [mozilla.com] +/- 2.8%.
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For comparison same setup with Firefox 4 Beta 6 got 17568.9ms [mozilla.com] +/- 0.3%
Setup:
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz
4.00 GB RAM
Intel SSD 80GB G2
Improvement? (Score:2)
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
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"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?
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
The one I work for is still on XP/IE6 - simply because the expense/work around an upgrade of either isn't worth it.
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No cross platform support either (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
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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
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Oops, somehow I missed that it's been out on Windows for a while. Well, still no Linux version, anyway. =]
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> 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 LL
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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 wh
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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
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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 i
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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BTW let me guess you pulled this 10% figure from this article [oreilly.com], 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...
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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.
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Duh.
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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.
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Could you be more wrong?
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To be fair, the last time they did anything like that it was between X86, Alpha and PowerPC.
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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 ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ? (Score:4, Informative)
XP is supported until 2014. [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
lol wut?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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, dependin