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."
Does it support... (Score:3, Interesting)
...OGG and VP8 out of the box now?
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I should add, the browser is fishing for X-Content-Duration headers [mozilla.org].
If you don't serve them, you'll get an orbital bombardment of '206 partial content' requests, as it attempts auto-discovery on every single track.
Re:'partial content' requests (Score:2)
Is this still there on Beta 11?
Last I briefly looked at the FF Development Notes they're making progress on getting rid of 'blocker' bugs, which I figured yours would be.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2011-02-08 [mozilla.org]
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But then again, firefox has a show stopping html5 audio bug, which renders it useless for probably most applications.
Oh cool. Can you post the link for the release candidate for Firefox 4?
Wooooooosh... (Score:2)
The point is, not everyone will upgrade to firefox 4 over night, even when it does get released.
You'll have this lingering tail of late adopters, with misbehaving browsers.
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I'm a web developer. When I put up audio and video files, I'd like to be able to put up one single format and have every browser be able to play it, and do so without bringing netbooks to their knees with flash.
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The Fail Whale called, he wants his job back from you.
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Odd based on that, I'd be serving .WAV, not ogg or mp3. However, we will most likely be serving .mp3 and let the firefox guys cry themselves a river (or get a plug in).
When can I get the final version? (Score:3)
When will I be able to get the final version? I'm not normally a Microsoft fan, but I use IE a lot at work and I am legitimately excited about the prospect of a new version. I wish they would release a Mac version.
Re:When can I get the final version? (Score:5, Funny)
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So that I can work from home without feeling the wrath of an unsupported browser. I wouldn't have to use it all the time.
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>>>feeling the wrath of an unsupported browser.
Use Opera 10 or 11 with "mask as internet explorer" turned on. Problem solved. It won't look like IE but it will act like IE and display the same pages.
You can also use Opera's online web-stored bookmarks to access your work links from home (and vice-versa). And the built-in email/torrent clients to do stuff in the background.
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You mean one of these [wikipedia.org]?
"The in gear acceleration times are 50-70 mph in 5.6 seconds, quicker than BMW's 330i which takes 6.0 seconds. 20-40 mph in 2.4 seconds is as quick as the Lotus Elise 111R. Despite this the Fabia vRS can achieve better than 6.2 L/100 km (46 mpg-imp; 38 mpg-US). If driven carefully some drivers have experienced MPG rates of 65-70 mpg over long periods. The Fabia VRS has a top speed of approximately 130 mph (210 km/h)."
Nothing wrong
Re:When can I get the final version? (Score:4, Funny)
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Why on earth do you want a Mac version? That's like putting a Skoda steering wheel in your BMW.
If I had a Mac, which I don't because I hate Apple, I would rather have any other browser in the world than Safari. My wife accidentally installed it when she downloaded iTunes onto her Windows laptop, and having played with it, it is without doubt the most horrible piece of software (apart from fucking iTunes itself, and Quicktime of course) ever to appear on a home computer.
IMHO.
April (Score:4, Funny)
Ok, I read the fucking article, and it's supposed to be available mid-April.
What's MS up to? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are two strategies MS can play:
I don't think the first strategy will work anymore. People learned what IE6 really costs in the long run. That leaves strategy two. But why bother? It a huge investment development wise, and I don't see them gaining anything from it without the vendor lock-in. So is this just "we want a browser too", or what?
Re:What's MS up to? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's MS up to? (Score:5, Insightful)
You almost got it right. It's more like, "Provide a free browser that fully supports .Net so that the thousands of developers who develop against the Microsoft stack (SQL Server, Sharepoint, etc) will have a stable target to aim for."
I get the sense that as a company, Microsoft could give two shits about which browser home users are using. They do care about their developers though. They do care about the enterprise. They need a known platform for their developers to target. That is why they need IE.
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Provide a free browser that fully supports .Net
How can a browser "support .NET"?
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<script type="text/c#"> ...
?
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That's what Silverlight is, in a sense. But it works in browsers other than IE.
Re:What's MS up to? (Score:5, Interesting)
It hooks into the .Net APIs that are on the client OS. I'm thinking about it in terms of a lot of the applications that I have dealt with over the last couple of years. They all seem to be built in .Net, and leverage IIS and SQL. The client workstations all need .Net and IIS for the application to work.
I think it is a lot like what Google is doing with Chrome. Google has a vision about what applications and services they want to offer via their platform. Rather than pin their hopes on "browser vendors" to adopt specific ways of doing things, Google made their own browser. That browser supports the functionality that Google devs need.
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Find a new company. Quick.
Re:What's MS up to? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Let me go ahead and leave a multi-million dollar firm that does business with the SEC, DoJ and just about every major law firm out there because the best document review and eDiscovery tools are built around a Microsoft stack. I don't care who makes the tools I use. I care that the tools get the job done. FYI - I have a bunch of LAMP and WAMP servers up too.
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Let me go ahead and leave a multi-million dollar firm that does business with the SEC, DoJ and just about every major law firm out there because the best document review and eDiscovery tools are built around a Microsoft stack.
This has nothing to do with MS stack, and everything to do with the fact that (per your claim) your software requires client machines to have server software deployed on them to work. Architecturally, that's braindead.
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It was a typo. I put IIS where I should have put IE.
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Sounds like a bit of overkill needing SQL Server, ASP.NET and IIS on a client machine. What applications are these?
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SQL and IIS are on the back end. The client is just IE with the .Net environment.
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What century have you been living in ?
Why get caught with your pants down and not use HTML,CSS,JS,SVG,WebGL and all the other webtechnologies, so it instantly works on all browsers and devices, from PC's, netbooks, pads, pdas all the way down to smartphones.
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It hooks into the .Net APIs that are on the client OS. I'm thinking about it in terms of a lot of the applications that I have dealt with over the last couple of years. They all seem to be built in .Net, and leverage IIS and SQL. The client workstations all need .Net and IIS for the application to work.
This sounds like BS to me, since IIS is server-side software. It's like saying that there is software that requires client workstations to have Apache - I can see an extremely convoluted architecture that'd have such a requirement (a "local web app" of sorts), but that's hardly best practice.
Your typical ASP.NET (MVC or not) application certainly doesn't require any of that - IIS, MSSQL etc all run server-side, and that is the part that is "locked in", but client is just served HTML/CSS/JS. You can definite
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Typo alert.
Should have read..
The client workstations all need .Net and IE for the application to work.
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That said, if IE is more co
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.NET is server-side code in the shape of ASP.NET
If .NET is ONLY server side then why is there a downloadable version of it for clients? There obviously has to be some sort of processing going on with the client that requires certain DLLs.
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That's the reason that makes the most business sense. I have a feeling that the real reason is, like you alluded to, because Balmer thinks they need to have a browser.
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I think given the work they've done to bring IE9 standards compliance up to par, it's more the second one.
Also, vendor lock-in to a browser just isn't a reality anymore. IE might always be part of Windows and thus gain wider adoption on that platform, but given that smartphones (of which MS has like 2% market share) have outsold laptops, and both tablets and Macs are poised to further erode the PC market share, web developers would be crazy to code to IE-specific features, even in intranet applications.
It's
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They are still behind all the other browsers. Other browsers have many, many more features. They are a whole range: from the smaller pieces like CSS columns or webworkers, to whole standards like WebGL and an important part of the HTML5-spec offline cache and HTML5-local-storage and -session-storage, indexeddb which allow you to build applications which also still work when you are not connected.
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I'm sorry, since when did all other browsers implement the things you're talking about? I'm not sure any of them have implemented all of it.
What's more, all of those things are draft standards, and subject to change. In my opinion, it's reckless to implement things and call them standards when they're not actually standards yet. People can use them, and then the standards change...
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Great rant, but he is either being disingenuous, or missing the point.
Microsoft says that the W3C tests should be used to validate compliance, because the W3C are the ones that create the specs. If Mozilla doesn't like that, then they should submit more validation tests to the W3C, just like Microsoft has. Their failure to do so indicates they have no interst in a true standards conformance measurement.
Instead, they choose to use other tests that merely test for features, not whether the features are actu
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Microsoft is a company made up of hundreds of development groups working on hundreds of products in a dozen divisions.
Most of the people who are on those teams care about the work they're doing, care about the products they release and want to release the best products possible.
So, relative to IE9, what it Microsoft up to? If I had to guess, a hard-working team of engineers, program managers and test engineers are busting their asses to make the best browser they can. They care more about standards than I'd
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I agree that the "old school" route is no longer a viable option and the progression of MSIE, from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9, shows that the IE team knows it and Corporate accepts this fate and allows the team to release decent browsers. To your question "why bother", that answer has two parts: one, because as a leading tech company with their own OS, they absolutely can't NOT make a browser (think of their image in the tech world if they didn't) and two, because of a slightly different kind of lock-in. If Windows s
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There are two strategies MS can play: Old school IE: Make own standards to try to vendor lock-in people with the MS platform Standards compliant IE: Try to closely adhere to standards and basically render like all the other browsers
There is a third option:
"Bullet point" compliance. But support for whatever "de-facto" standards evolve as well.
The geek's "open standards" are a highly politicized commitee product and typically finalized about the time the Last Trumpet blows.
That is why Google tried for a pre-emptive strike with WebM.
But it is also why Google has been remarkably soft-spoken about Flash and Microsoft's H.264 extension for Chrome -
and quieter still about HEVC/H.265 - which is only two or three years out.
The target
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AFRIK it is actually IE 5.x that focused on the first one, when they were competing with Netscape 4.x. IE 6 tried to be little more standard compliant. For example, they made it slightly more CSS1 compliant (enough to pass Acid1 I think), and added it as a "standards mode" triggered by DOCTYPE switching. But then they sat on it for five years, and guess what people did with the IE6 "standards mode" during the time?
Canvas.globalCompositeOperation (Score:4, Informative)
Canvas.globalCompositeOperation works now!
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I hadn't seen that one yet, nice catch.
Only disables third-party tracking (Score:2)
Third-party tracking is disabled, but I bet you first-party [slashdot.org] tracking gets cranked up a notch - after all, now IE knows you're doing something you don't want other people knowing about, and that's definitely a "signal", as the Microsoft representative said :)
Re:Analystics (Score:2)
Worse than just Ghostery, my beta Firefox seems to permanently be waiting for ssl.google-analytics.com here on Slashdot.
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Allow me to share with you one of the ~130k lines in my /etc/hosts:
Problem solved. Repeat for other hostnames you don't want tracking you.
Does it track my Google habits? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this preclude my Google search habits? [dailytech.com]
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And it still doesn't support XP (Score:3)
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My father/dad still uses his old Windows 2000 SP4 so he has to use the latest Firefox v3.6.xx.
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Oh wow, I thought v4 wasn''t supporting in W2K. Cool. By v5, then he will have a faster and newer OS! :)
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but given that means new hardware for most of the people still using XP
I think 32-bit Win7 can at least in theory run on most Win2000-era and later hardware as long as you have enough RAM, thanks in part to driver compatibility.
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Re:And it still doesn't support XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Support has to end at some point. It might be time to move forward grandpa.
Why?
My machine works fine on XP. I have all the software I need and Mozilla is still supporting XP versions. And even if they stop, my version of Firefox and Thunderbird work quite fine.
All this needless upgrading of hardware does nothing but increase the hole in my pocketbook and fill in landfill holes in poor Asian countries - and adding to the World's pollution.
There's got to be a time when we have to slow our consumption down; especially with the highly toxic electronics.
--Yours,
Pops
P.S. I kinda like to leave some semblance of an environment to you kids.
Re:And it still doesn't support XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you go to Best Buy and complain that they don't sell Beta tapes?
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Time to replace that '92 Mustang you're driving too. Or was it a '68 Camaro, or a '65 Corvette, etc.
You completely missed the point. You have to support what out there in common use, not just the latest and greatest version. When they reformulate gasoline, it doesn't mean you have to replace your old car. When then changed to OPD valves on propane tanks, you didn't have to replace you grills and heaters. It's only in electronics that we allow companies/industries to make 3-5 yr old devices obsolete by disco
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Weak analogy.. does that mean that we should be patching hardware and software written in '68? or '65?
No.. because technology of computers moves a LOT faster then technology of cars. Should Microsoft still be releasing patches for Windows 95? Bob? DOS 6.22?!?
If you want to drive a Model T, I imagine it's still legal on most roads, but don't expect Ford to be responsible to install the seat belts and airbags and all the other safety features that have happened in the last 80 years or so. Same with Window
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What part of my argument is illogicial or extreme? Let's not degenerate this thread into baseless acusations.. please elaborate what you mean.
Yes, you can drive an old car on the road (or use old software), but don't expect the manufacturer to patch "security" vulnerabilities (like, say, airbags in a '69 Camaro)
You are saying that because we drive '68 car's on the road, the industry should be keeping patched "older products work just fine". Sure you said common, but you also use cars made in the 60s as yo
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What part of my argument is illogicial or extreme? Let's not degenerate this thread into baseless acusations.. please elaborate what you mean.
How about this part?
... does that mean that we should be patching hardware and software written in '68? or '65?
...If you want to drive a Model T,...
You exaggerated my 3-5 year comment on computer support to over 45 years and my 45 yr extreme example with cars to nearly 100 years. Exaggerating what someone said to the point of absurdity is called a Straw Man [nizkor.org], it's one of the logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are by definition illogical.
I made no assertions about using computers from the '60s, or the '20s, or even the 1990s. I didn't mention DOS and I didn't even mention Windows 2000 which XP replaced 10 years ago. However, MS was
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"Time to replace that '92 Mustang you're driving too. Or was it a '68 Camaro, or a '65 Corvette, etc."
Soo... taking Windows XP (it's what, 10 years old? Last sold 2 years ago?) and comparing it to 45 year old cars is... what.. NotStrawMan?
"Once a networked computer can't get secure applications or security patches for the OS, it's life on the net gets very short."
Not really, not if your Enthusiastic Enough about it, there's options, 3rd party or even, let's say "After Market" options you can install - firew
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60% of the market is currently XP that's a lot of people to insult.
No it's not [statcounter.com]. XP's market share has been dropping steadily for a while now. I wouldn't be surprised if that trend accelerated over the next year as companies get around to infrastructure upgrades they put off during the recession.
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It requires a version of
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To be more precise, Vista SP2 with the Platform Update. Actually there is another supplement to that update required too to fix some problems with the original for Vista SP2 and Win7 RTM but that is automatically installed when you install IE9.
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their contract with MS which got them copies of XP for free doesn't allow for upgrades.
Upgrades to IE?
Excellent (Score:2, Interesting)
Power users may not want it, but that is not important. What is important is that average users at home now have access to a secure and well performing browser. No more shitty toolbars or
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And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
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Actually, a sizable chunk will have to upgrade their entire PC to get Windows 7 so it's a lot more for lots of folks.
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Well, at least in theory 32-bit Win7 will run on most Win2000 and later hardware as long as you have enough RAM.
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And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
Or, you know, $110/3 on Amazon. By all means don't let reality get in the way of your ranting, though.
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No more shitty toolbars or Active X crap, just a fast browser that works.
Not exactly true, but they added ActiveX filtering in the RC to limit the impact.
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> Firefox 4 has support for DEP but not ASLR
That's just false. Firefox 4 supports ASLR, as do current 3.6 security updates. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405523 [mozilla.org] and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559133 [mozilla.org] and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567134 [mozilla.org]
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And for what it's worth, I agree with you: the MS team has done a good job here. Much like with IE5, in fact...
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I don't like the limited space for tabs
Sanity has been restored in that department with this release: right-click on tab bar and choose "Show tabs on a separate row", and then it all works as God intended.
Mac Version? (Score:3)
I know I'm being overly optimistic, but wouldn't it be nice if we could get an OSX version if IE9? I have to run XP in Parallels just to test in IE. Dropping Windows for good would be so nice. :)
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On that matter, I wonder why didn't they adopt MS's own Tasman engine that was used in Mac IE 5 instead of spending years hacking Trident.
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IE9 was built around new Vista/Win7 DirectX APIs. They would have to have two completely different versions of IE9 because you can't build code the same way in XP that you can in Vista/7 when using the new features.
It's a different API that needs different information.
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Given that IE9 doesn't work on XP because it uses hardware acceleration APIs that don't exist in anything below Vista SP2, I doubt they'll release a VM image of Windows with IE9.
Will it address my biggest IE 8 complaint? (Score:2)
And by that I mean - when users install IE 9, will it do the smart thing and default to "compatibility mode = off", or will it default to "let's intentionally make sure web pages that use even a small subset of current web standards won't work even though this browser is capable of rendering them mostly correctly", like IE 8 does?
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It's up to the web developer to create a standards-compliant page. If the put a DOCTYPE at the top of the page, IE (8 or 9) will use the newest rendering engine. If they omit the DOCTYPE it'll use quirks mode because it assumes the page is a total hack written by somebody who wouldn't know a web standard if it hit him on the ass.
let us look at motives (Score:2)
I do not see why should Microsoft make a convenient and fast browser? So that people can use online Office applications and stop buying the desktop MS Office?
It just does not make sense. Their best bet would be to use the monopoly of the pre-installed browser to make the Web unusable.
The web 2.0 as we know it was created by the Firefox. I can understand why Firefox team wants to move the Internet forward.
I apologize for being frank in expressing my doubts and probably groundless suspicions.
Re:let us look at motives (Score:4, Funny)
I do not see why should Microsoft make a convenient and fast browser?
MS made IE9 so fast as a prank on all slashdotters - right now its pretty much the only browser can render slashdot threads smoothly. So cruel.
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The web 2.0 as we know it was created by the Firefox
The web as we know it today resulted from:
1. A need to apply complex formatting, logic, animation, and user interaction
2. An absence of a formal standard for the above
3. Many vendors' ideas and attempts to fill this immediate need through proprietary extensions to the markup
4. The glacial pace of standards bodies to document and ratify standards
5. Many vendors' iterative attempts to back away from their proprietary extensions in favor of the now finalized standards
Firefox benefits from the fact that i
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?
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%
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It's interesting how those numbers change when you remove "Working Draft" and "Other" from the criteria:
IE 9.0: 75%
Firefox 4.0: 93%
Safari 5.0: 89%
Chrome 10.0: 96%
Opera 11.1: 99%
IE's still in last place, but it does considerably better when you stop including specifications that aren't yet finished.
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?
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Where on W3C can I find the compatibility tests that show the various browser support levels?
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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).
Yea, remember when IE3 and IE4 rushed to implement CSS1 and CSS2 respectively even though both was released before the corresponding level became a recommendation.
Faster than Chrome and Opera? Damn.. (Score:2)
No matter what your browser of choice is right now, IE9 is adding to the competition in a good way - even following standards more strictly than some others [cnet.com] (eg. not implementing non-standards/unfinished standards).
SVG? Border Radius? (Score:3)
Full list IE9RC features [microsoft.com]
All that I care about is SVG.
It was promised in IE 7, then pulled at the last moment. They said it would be in IE 8.
IE 8 came out, and it wasn't included. They said it would be in IE 9
Finally, it looks like most SVG features will finally be available. Half of that document is about SVG. It's a shame that SMIL isn't included, but considering it's MS, and especially considering it's something free from MS, you have to have low expectations.
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Slashdot itself uses border-radius. It has worked just fine for months now. Admittedly it was somewhat annoying that /. used to feed old-school CSS that didn't include the rounded corners when it detected IE, but you could trick it into sending the right code and now everything works. Since the recent "facelift" IE9 gets the right CSS by default, and yes it includes CSS3 things.
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Seriously, no one here even slightly gives a shit. Actually no one anywhere.
Yeah, nobody's affected when a new version of IE is released.