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Internet Explorer Microsoft

IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions 378

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-could-do-better-than-this dept.
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.
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IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions More

IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions

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  • I'm impressed with the work, but it's still a little glitchy, slower to load and just not as blazing fast as Chrome.

    • I'm impressed with the work, but it's still a little glitchy, slower to load and just not as blazing fast as Chrome.

      And yet those of us who do web development and/or have clients who do will need to support it with CSS & javascript patches just like every other major browser on the market.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by figleaf ( 672550 )

      I am not sure what is your glitch or why it is not fast for you.
      I can say that Microsoft has really beaten the pants off Chrome with the release of IE9 as far as speed is concerned.

      Its much faster for me than Chrome and now it has Ad blocking / tracking blocking, per site flash blocking, plays well with high DPI monitors among many other nice features.
      I only wish they had made the 64-bit version faster too (but I can wait for the next release).

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @09:48AM (#35490740)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • You mean, something like http://simple-adblock.com/ [simple-adblock.com] It works pretty well on IE7 and IE8. It says it works on IE9, but haven't tried it on the final release yet.

      I agree, I am a hardcore Firefox user, and LOVE Firefox 4, but, DAMN, IE9 is FAST! Runs great on my work computer with 2 gig of ram, Windows Vista 32 bit, and a multi-core Intel processor. Can't wait to get home and install it in Windows 7 Business 64-bit on a 6-core AMD, 8 gig of ram and an nVidia - GPU. Shoot, the release candidate ran circles aro

  • "Media has opinions" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hazel Bergeron ( 2015538 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @09:49AM (#35490758) Journal

    If we're going to write inane headlines, let's at least try to be funny...

    1. Include Your Children When Baking Cookies

    2. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Experts Say

    3. Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers

    4. Drunks Get Nine Months in Violin Case

    5. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms

    6. Prostitutes Appeal to Pope

    7. Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over

    8. British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands

    9. Teacher Strikes Idle Kids

    10. Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead

    11. Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told

    12. Miners Refuse to Work After Death

    13. Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

    14. Stolen Painting Found by Tree

    15. Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter

    16. War Dims Hope for Peace

    17. If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last a While

    18. Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide

    19. Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge

    20. New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

    21. Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Space

    22. Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

    23. Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

    24. Typhoon Rips through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

    • Dude, don't you know that the whole world is shutting down nuclear reactors? Stop wasting precious electricity, and just link to the headlines [humormatters.com] next time.

      Oh crap, I just wasted some too ... *tries to delete post*

    • Another one of my favorites occurred when there was a dispute over some toxic waste that had been disposed of illegally: "Finger Pointing Over Dumping"

    • 5. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms

      From the Wikipedia article on Michael Foot (British Politician and leader of the Labour Party in the early '80s):

      In 1986, Foot was the subject of one of the best-known newspaper headlines of all time. The Times ran an article about Foot, who had been put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee. The headline stated "Foot Heads Arms Body." Although originally written as a joke by editor Martyn Cornell, the paper ran it.

      Of course some of us secretly wished that Mr Foot could find some evidence that the mi

  • People who hate IE currently will still hate it (for some its almost a religion - IE could give them free money and they would still hate it), those who like it will probably still like it (having used some of the Betas I can't see anything that would piss off an existing user). There will still be lots of frothy-mouthed ranting on the internet and those of us who really don't give a shit about who uses what browser will still just pick the one we like and get on with our lives.

  • 9% (Score:3)

    by asdf7890 ( 1518587 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @09:54AM (#35490842)
    While IE use has fallen drastically in the last year or two, that 9% figure is going to include quite a bit of audience bias. Unfortunately for those of us who have to support IE professionally the amount of people using it in some audiences is much higher, and an irritating percentage of those populations will be using ancient versions for some time to come. One of our banking clients (one of the largest in the UK) is planning to roll out IE8 "some time this year". The rest of out clients (including others in the "largest in the UK" category are still IE6 only on company desktop and laptop builds.

    IE9 would be good news (afterall, it is far more compliant then any version of IE that has gone before) if people using older IE versions switched to it. Unfortunately this is not going to happen as many people who are still using IE for day-to-day browsing either don't care enough to upgrade (hence aren't already using FF/Chrome/Opera/other, though if IE is pushed as an "important" update MS will catch most if the Vista/7 users automagically) and/or simply can't because IE9 will not run on XP.

    • Re: Won't run on XP (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TaoPhoenix ( 980487 ) <TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @10:13AM (#35491090) Journal

      I feel this is a bigger issue than might seem at first glance.

      We have a powerful plateau situation in desktop tech. Cite "The Economy", social changes and more; the first two generations of former active experimenters are starting to become satiated now that modestly significant progress has been made. If you merge all the disparate threads of "we can't figure out the next quantum leap in OS", the Age of Good Enough, and the hidden walled up cost of moving Enterprise off of XP, for Microsoft to start to pit a browser as a hardware-based deliberate fragmentation will cause a pressure-cooker situation of a type that will simmer slowly until some further factor sets it off.

      Let's coin a word: "Rhetorical Luddite". I thought ahead and built a custom quad core XP machine in 2006 that is still middle of the line now. Now it's MS's job to "prove" why XP absolutely must go to make way for the upgrade they'd like me to make. To do that, I currently guess it would take another Killer App of some kind. These little deliberate fragmentations instead are irritating.

      My approximate current plan is that Windows 8 in 2013 will be the switch point, if at the same time both a hardware and application super-breakthrough shows up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        If XP does it for you, keep at it. That said, unlike Vista which was a dog there's no particular reason not to use Win7 in my opinion. It works very well, handles all the bells and whistles like SSD alignment, 64 bit everything including >4 GB ram and so on.

      • Let's coin a word: "Rhetorical Luddite". I thought ahead and built a custom quad core XP machine in 2006 that is still middle of the line now. Now it's MS's job to "prove" why XP absolutely must go to make way for the upgrade they'd like me to make. To do that, I currently guess it would take another Killer App of some kind. These little deliberate fragmentations instead are irritating.

        I'd say security updates and new features and better support for more hardware. I mean, would you keep running Debian 2.2 on your desktop, which are both released about the same time?

  • is the 'pin tab on taskbar' feature (if you have Win7). My company blocks access to GMail, so I have to use the web interface -- now I can have GMail in its own 'application' on the taskbar next to Outlook :)

    And yes, I am aware of the Firefox 4 'application tabs' feature -- I've been using my GMail that way ever since I started using the FF4 beta.

    Now time will tell which solution fits my needs best.

    • Chrome has that as well: Wrench -> Tools -> Create Application Shortcuts (in fact you can choose desktop, taskbar and/or start menu)

  • ....fast (Score:4, Informative)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @10:02AM (#35490956)

    I just tried that canvas bench in the link.

    31 FPS in FF 3.6.15 and 302 FPS in IE9.

    Beyond that bit of trivia, browsing with this thing is a lot faster and smoother than Chrome or FF.

    Of course, it was a no reboot install and I'm concerned that my PC won't boot correctly the next time around or my drive will be filled with malware the next time I click on IE.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by daid303 ( 843777 )

      50FPS on FF 3.6.15 on linux. Guess it's limited to 50FPS, but it's not a smooth animation on linux.

  • A more standards compliant IE is always to be welcomed. What should not be welcomed is that "more" standards compliant != standards compliant. Things like web workers & WebGL are not implemented in IE9 which is quite disturbing. Web workers have massive potential for interactive sites, and WebGL is critical for games and some kinds of visual sites. What I hope is that nobody bothers to compromise for the sake of IE's inadequacies or egregious omissions in the way they may have done in the past. Design t
    • Not supporting WebGL is a real problem ... The same think happen back when SVG was introduced and IE not supporting it held back the use of 2D graphics in web pages for 10 years. Now MS is with SVG in IE9 i.e. 2D graphics but it is repeating history with WebGL and setting back 3D web page graphics in exactly the way it did with 2D! See the link in the post threat to web development [i-programmer.info]

    • I would agree with you if IE was the only one like that, however, NOT A SINGLE BROWSER implements all of the standards (HTML5, CSS3, etc). All of them have bugs, and all of them take a very very long time to correct them when they are found.

      I currently have bugs submitted to webkit, chrome, firefox, and the IE team. I don't even both with opera, there are just too many. All of them have been reproduced, none of them fixed, and most are 1+ years old and still buggy in the latest versions of the browsers.

      • Yes you are correct that the situation is complicated and yes all browsers are troubled in the same way by not supporting standards but.... WebGL is slightly different as it provides 3D and web developers wanting to take things in a new direction need it to create games and other similar stuff. All of the major browsers are at least attempting to support WebGL except Microsoft (basically because it would undermine DirectX). This isn't a failure of implementation its a decision not to implement for competing

    • A more standards compliant IE is always to be welcomed. What should not be welcomed is that "more" standards compliant != standards compliant.

      For the sake of balance, the best that Firefox, Safari/Webkit, Opera et. al. can claim is that they are "more" standards compliant than past Microsoft efforts. There are plenty of glitches when trying to use (say) scripted SVG or more recent CSS features on multiple non-MS platforms (not to mention the current total existence failure of SVG on Android). Also, forget 3D, does any browser properly support the CSS printing control attributes (most support "page-break: before" but that's it).

      Part of the proble

  • IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions

    No one else uses it.

  • Anyone know how to turn off cleartype? There doesn't seem to be an option for it in options, so, registry change?

    • It might conceivably be possible to disable it in the registry, but there is no setting. It's on whether you disable cleartype for the OS or not.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Skuto ( 171945 )

      I think your problem is DirectWrite, not ClearType. It's what makes the canvas demos so fast, at the "slight" cost of making text almost unreadable.

      You can try switching the page view to compatibility mode, which disables it.

  • WTF? No XP support? (Score:4, Informative)

    by briansct ( 1857764 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @10:19AM (#35491168) Journal
    At work on Win XP (imagine that) trying to upgrade. . . "To install Internet Explorer 9, you need to upgrade to a more recent version of Windows"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by devent ( 1627873 )

      Don't run on Linux either.

      $ wine IE9-WindowsVista-x86-enu.exe
      fixme:advapi:RegisterTraceGuidsW (0x6cd15f38, 0x6cd20180, {e2821408-c59d-418f-ad3f-aa4e792aeb79}, 1, 0x33de50, (null), (null), 0x6cd20188,)
      fixme:commctrl:TaskDialogIndirect 0x33d970, 0x33d9d4, (nil), (nil)

      The same with Windows7 version.

    • Re:WTF? No XP support? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by psydeshow ( 154300 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @02:18PM (#35494430) Homepage

      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!

  • and the first thing I notice is that the giant "Back" button is cut off at the bottom? How do you not notice that and release a browser with a glaring UI problem?

  • Lies... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @10:37AM (#35491400)

    http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/highlights/all-around-fast

    "Without hardware acceleration, browsers only use about 10% of the processing power your PC has to offer. Internet Explorer 9 unlocks that other 90%. "

    Rubbish! Firefox frequently uses 99% of my cpu!

  • Executive Summary of Comments (Score:5, Funny)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <hoytduffNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @10:45AM (#35491500) Homepage Journal

    Microsoft is good/evil.
    IE 9 is wonderful/terrible.
    Opera/Safari/Firefox is better/worse.
    The best OS is Windows/Mac/Linux.
    Sun rises in East/West.
    The sun does not 'rise' you insensitive clod.

  • My GWT (google web toolkit) sites are not working with IE9 this morning. Irritation is starting to grow. I sure hope Google releases an update to the GWT SDK soon. It was a pretty serious error to not get ahead of this I think. The RCs and Betas have been around for and they didn't work either.

  • I like it. I'm not one of these people [penny-arcade.com], so maybe my opinion doesn't matter here, but it runs at least as fast as Chrome on my system and is giving me quite a bit of screen real estate to work with. Having said that, the back button seems cut off by the bookmarks bar, which is really annoying.
  • I don't run a supported platform so I can't test IE9, but anything that shrinks the IE6/IE7 userbase is just fine with me. I'm happy that MS is keeping up their focus on browser development ever since Firefox lit a fire under their ass, and Chrome lit a fire under both their asses. What up Opera. Good job everyone.

  • But... But Chrome is going to.... (Score:3)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @11:56AM (#35492504) Journal
    Pity Microsoft, finally when they release IE 9, Chromed is ready to go to 11

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