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."
Re:Here's to hoping (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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.
tabs on the same row as address bar (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:tabs on the same row as address bar (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No cross platform support either (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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.
Re:Here's to hoping (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it mean websites can now exploit bugs in the Ring-0 graphics driver as well as all those other things?
Re:I know other whores... (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
To borrow a maxim from the working world: If you don't appearing to be working, you're wasting company time.
Next thing you know, someone will be working on cloud-rendered javascript.
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".
Re:tabs on the same row as address bar (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Chrome Frame".
Complaints about how our site renders improperly... have all but disappeared... Thanks Google for giving me a way to break the rusty bear-trap that is IE6.
Re:M$ snubs XP ? (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:Browsers are applications not operating systems (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, depending on how well the API maps to what the GPU wants to see.
Doesn't seem like there's any confusion of roles here....