IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions

Yesterday Microsoft released IE9 and since then we've been getting tons of submissions about it: It's hard to tell if it is a threat to web development or the fastest thing on the web or even a waste of time. You'll just have to decide for yourself... if you are one of the 9% of Slashdot readers who actually uses IE.

Re:91%

[Kyokugenryu]

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant in the least. IE is still the leading browser, and it's kind of a big deal when the industry leader has a major release, especially one that addresses many of the issues the 91% of Slashdotters using it has. I'm not a big IE fan either, but I tried the 9 beta and it's a hell of a lot better than I remember IE being. Hell, I honestly think IE9 is a much better browser than Firefox is nowadays, and it's my #2 browser to go to when crap doesn't work in Chrome.

Re:Ten times as fast as which Firefox version?

[FyRE666]

Initially I was referring to the latest live release of Firefox (3.6). On my system my test (linked from story) runs at ~34fps. Firefox 4.0 Beta hits ~97fps and IE9 ~311fps. That's quite a performance gap. The test is mostly rendering polygons in a quick little JS 3D engine, with some canvas->canvas blitting & rotation mixed in. Note that both Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4.0 appear to be CPU bound, where IE is bound by the resolution of the interval timer (I assume), as it's only using 2-3% CPU.

Re:WTF? No XP support?

[Verunks]

it doesn't support windows 3.1 either so what? windows xp doesn't have direct2d, if you need a browser that supports css3 and html5 use firefox 4 or chrome, if you can't install them because of company policies then you probably don't need them anyway

Re:WTF? No XP support?

[psydeshow]

Oh crap.

I read other replies to this, blah blah blah MS announced this a long time ago, XP is too old for new APIs, etc.
You're missing the point folks.

As a web developer, I have been looking forward to IE9 as a means of deliverance from having to add style and functionality workarounds for IE6, IE7, and IE8. Designers have been putting rounded corners and drop shadows and complicated borders on everything for a couple years now. This stuff looks great in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. And it doesn't show up at all in IE. I have to use GIFs. Not even PNGs --- GIFs, because IE7<7 doesn't support transparent PNG.

There are so, so many people still on XP, and using it happily to get stuff done. We're talking about Presidents and Board Chairs here, the people who pay the bills. They will not upgrade just because there is a new version of IE. So now, instead of supporting 3 versions of IE, we will need to support 4, with all of the same headaches.

So instead of celebrating at long last the release of IE9, I have to go sacrifice a goat and pray that MS will update the rendering engine in IE8 to include an HTML5 mode for XP. Damn you, Redmond!