Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 9 RC 229
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. The new RC build includes a Tracking Protection feature, which gives users the option to control what third-party site content can track them when they're online, as well as a new ActiveX filtering option, which allows users to turn on/off ActiveX plug-ins. Best of all, Microsoft has addressed what was arguably the biggest complaint with the new version: if you want your tabs on a separate line from the address box, there's now an option to turn that on from the right click menu at the top of the browser. At the same time, IE9 RC is significantly faster than the beta version. Furthermore, many site rendering issues have been fixed, although we can't say that it's working perfectly. Last but not least, the new build includes hundreds of bug fixes."
Canvas.globalCompositeOperation (Score:4, Informative)
Canvas.globalCompositeOperation works now!
When can I use says... (Score:2, Informative)
IE 9 is still crap. I can't run it on my Linux, OS X or even XP box!
MS claims that it's standards compliant. Well, it might be better than IE 8 but it's no where near the competition. Checkout the summary of at the bottom of this page: http://caniuse.com/ [caniuse.com]
"Compatibility tables for support of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and more in desktop and mobile browsers"
IE 9.0: 62%
Firefox 4.0: 87%
Safari 5.0: 79%
Chrome 10.0: 92%
Opera 11.1: 77%
Re:When can I use says... (Score:5, Informative)
That page is full of BS. They test a lot of things they shouldn't, including redundent and even deprecated drafts of standards, and penalize you for not "supporting" them.
Go to the source, with W3C. According to them, and their compatibility tests, IE9 is doing fine - it's actually ahead of most of the competition on each part of CSS3, for example.
It's also worth noting that IE9's pre-release versions are very careful about supporting non-standard stuff with "standardized" names. For example, IE9 actually does support WebSockets just fine, but because the standard isn't finished, they use a "draft" extension on the name (websocket-draft). This causes sites like caniuse to claim IE9 can't do web sockets, which isn't accurate - other browsers are just implementing a "standard" that isn't.
Ironically enough, this is the kind of behavior that people got so pissed off (quite rightfully) at IE6 for. Just because it isn't MS, does that mean it's now OK to make uup your own standards when they arent' actually standardized yet?
Re:let us look at motives (Score:4, Informative)
Web 2.0 was pretty much explicitly defined by Microsoft, albeit by accident. AJAX itself a technical underpinning of 2.0 [wikipedia.org] was initiated by the XMLHttpRequestObject that shipped with IE5. This was then adapted by other browsers.
Have a look at the history section here [wikipedia.org].
As for why Microsoft should release a new version of IE? Well, what else would they do, give up?