IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions 378
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.
Love the attempt, but... (Score:2)
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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.
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.
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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).
I wonder... (Score:2)
When you say beaten the pants off... How many milliseconds are talking about?
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The best feature about Chrome is that extensions run sandboxed, so there is a significantly smaller chance of malicious software being able to gain a user, or even worse, root context through the browser.
This is arguably the biggest vector for infection these days, so anything that closes this hole is good.
Of course, the best solution is Adblock, so the ad sites that ignore or even condone blackhat codes have their dirty work completely ignored.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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)
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
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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*
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5. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
From the Wikipedia article on Michael Foot (British Politician and leader of the Labour Party in the early '80s):
Of course some of us secretly wished that Mr Foot could find some evidence that the mi
Nothing will change (Score:2)
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)
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)
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.
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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.
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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?
One cool feature for me so far (Score:2)
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.
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....fast (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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50FPS on FF 3.6.15 on linux. Guess it's limited to 50FPS, but it's not a smooth animation on linux.
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He's compared the latest public releases of the browsers. Firefox 4 is still in beta and may never be formerly released in its current state (unlikely yes, but not impossible).
Somewhat welcome (Score:2)
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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.
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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 (Score:2)
IE9 Released, Media Has Opinions
No one else uses it.
Anyone know how to turn off cleartype? (Score:2)
Anyone know how to turn off cleartype? There doesn't seem to be an option for it in options, so, registry change?
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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.
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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)
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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)
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!
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I still got XP pre-installed on a netbook last year.
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Complain the the manufacturer, not Microsoft. Phasing out XP for good is long overdue.
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I'm not complaining, just making an observation that, until quite recently, XP was still sold with new computers.
Installed it at work... (Score:2)
Lies... (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.
GWT not working for me.... (Score:2)
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 have an opinion too! (Score:2)
I honestly have no idea (Score:2)
But... But Chrome is going to.... (Score:3)
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Actually, this is Internet Exploder [github.com] ;)
Re:91% (Score:4, Insightful)
No, we all hate IE, it's just 9% of us are at work, libraries, etc. where they force us to use IE.
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These suggestions always bug me (although it's nothing personal, tepples). I type in the Colemak keyboard layout, and have for years. At my last job they wouldn't let me install the keyboard layout.
"But then how am I supposed to type?"
"We don't care."
"Wait, so you won't let me install an open source script for AHK because it's not safe, but I have administrator access to my machine and we use IE6?"
"Does not fem-pute."
No way in hell they're going to let anyone install Google Chrome Frame. Their heads would e
ADA or foreign counterpart (Score:2)
"But then how am I supposed to type?"
"We don't care."
That's the time when you should either A. look for another job, or if that's not possible, B. take advice from a lawyer specializing in disability discrimination law.
No way in hell they're going to let anyone install Google Chrome Frame.
If the job in any way relates to a service available over the web, you can claim that you have to make sure the site displays properly for customers who use Chrome. "Either you let me install Chrome or you'll end up turning away customers."
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Yep, I'd like to see the stats on version distribution. It'll be many years until this PC is on IE9...
Re:91% (Score:5, Interesting)
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I am part of the majority. Me and 91% of the Slashdoters think that this story is irrelevant and IE is a piece of ... :-)
Anyone else with me ?
While I personally reach for pretty much anything but IE when I'm doing my browsing... It isn't irrelevant. IE is installed on the vast majority of computers out there.
I'm going to have to download and evaluate IE9 to see which bits of software it works with, and which bits it breaks. And then I'm going to have to build a deployment package and roll it out to the folks that need it. Because some essential website somewhere is going to start requiring it before too long.
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Re:91% (Score:5, Insightful)
I am part of the majority. Me and 91% of the Slashdoters think that this story is irrelevant and IE is a piece of ... :-)
Anyone else with me ?
...
here we go again...
IE isn't irrelevant at all.
It's a major part of why the web works and looks like it does today, and IE affects how web sites work for you with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. You don't even have to use IE - these news still matter to you! Both as a developer, or an end-user.
The web is usually designed after the weakest link (usually IE, standards-wise), so of course this story is irrelevant.
The browser forming the weakest link is still the weakest, but today got a whole lot stronger than with IE 8.
We can finally start developing for some aspects of HTML5 without having to restort to relying on updates in some sort of cross-browser third party "compatibility library" where it's easier to just not use those features at all. So the features aren't used at all. So even if you aren't a developer, it still matters, since web sites will start working better.
Authors will now at least start being able to take the step to exploit the potential of Chrome 10 or Firefox 4 better while not having to worry about ~50% not able to be supported well.
IE 9 still has flaws, and is still not there with the competition, but it's miles ahead of IE 8.
Windows XP is the weakest link. (Score:4, Insightful)
The browser forming the weakest link is still the weakest, but today got a whole lot stronger than with IE 8.
At this point, the weakest link is the wide remaining deployment of the nearly decade-old Windows XP operating system. IE 7 required Windows XP, which kept businesses that stuck with Windows 2000 on IE 6. Likewise, IE 9 requires Windows Vista, which will keep a lot of businesses on IE <= 8 for a while.
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I hate IE and don't use it unless I have no choice.
I am on the other hand a web developer and the fact that Microsoft is finally supporting standards is a fairly big deal. It may not be better or faster or more extensible than the competition, but the fact that the browser which will come pre-installed on most people's machines is not a gigantic pile of suck is something I'm actually quite happy about.
Most people simply aren't going to shop around for web browsers, and personally I'll be a happy man when I
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Unless you write websites.
Talk about being closed minded. Kind of like the people that will not use free anti-virus because it can not be good if it is free.
Have you tried IE9? If you are on Windows Vista or seven you probably should try it. If you work on websites you should use it for testing just like you use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera... You do test with all the available browsers don't you?
I still use mainly chrome and Firefox but I sure as shooting have tried out IE9. It wasn't bad at all just
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That wasn't an ellipsis. It was ASCII art.
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Exactly. Think of them as very small bird droppings. :-)
Re:My fox is on fire (Score:5, Informative)
Well in my own (albeit not very scientific) testing with canvas/js performance. It's running at around 10x the speed of Firefox. Much faster for sites with a lot of Canvas animation (as their own demos display - Firefox stutters along badly, while IE9 is so fast some of the tests are a blur.) I'm primarily a Firefox user, but it's hard to ignore this huge performance difference.
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Will it work on Wine/Crossover?
IE6 and 8 load. Sometimes, they even render a page.
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Ten times as fast as which Firefox version? (Score:2)
It's running at around 10x the speed of Firefox.
Is IE ten times as fast as Firefox 3.6 or Firefox 4 RC1?
Re:Ten times as fast as which Firefox version? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox
So are you saying the performance difference doesn't exist? Or, if it does exist, why do we care what the reasons are? Are you just apologizing for Firefox?
Let IE9 have its day, the IE team has earned it. They've put in a lot of hard work to finally release their first browser that is actually "good". It's taken them 15 years to do it, but at least they finally managed. Here's to seeing usage of all other IE versions drop.
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Is IE ten times as fast as Firefox 3.6 or Firefox 4 RC1?
The reality is, no one really knows how fast IE really is. Firefox has caught IE cheating at several benchmarks and when this was taken into account (adding NOOP), those same benchmarks were several times SLOWER than all other browsers, despite the fact the change should have made absolutely no effect. The implications are extremely profound.
Now that should not be interpreted to say that IE is slower than everything else at everything. The simple truth is, the parts where IE isn't purposely cheating have ha
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The "cheating" you mention was the result of dead code removal optimization.
As well documented, dead code removal would have not created the observed effect. And if it did, IE would be completely unable to be competitive with any browser. Dead code removal does not in any way explain their obvious cheats.
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Because you're just generally interested in the browser on the majority of desktops round the world perhaps getting closer to being standards adherent?
Do you just completely ignore stories on any piece of software that you don't use?
Re:My fox is on fire (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that the people who really care about IE's development are always those who, at some point, have struggled to get a commercial webpage with creative/nifty features to work cross browser.
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Because lately is is your lowest common denominator that you need to check for compatibility with. If it is as good as Microsoft says then that means the bar is raised, You can dump IE 6 and Put IE 7 and 8 on a functional approval set and IE 9 for full functional. Having worked on the Beta 9 I can tell you is is now much better in terms of following the standard. I wouldn't use it as my default browser but at least when I write code for it I am spending less time trying to make the quintet of IE, FireFo
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IE9 is a good step, but it's not going to kill IE6 any faster than existing options (IE7, IE8) have. IE6 is still around largely because of institutional and business users with intranets, with a small "gramma" contingent who CAN'T upgrade to 9 because they don't upgrade ever. It will likely cut swathes in IE7/8 deployment, and could legitimately reduce the burden of support for 7/8-specific quirks.
The only solution to IE6 is time... so now we continue playing the waiting game.
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IE8 is supported on XPsp3, but 9 isn't coming to XP at all.
Once the holdouts jump ship to a modern OS, that will make a difference, but I just can't see IE 9 being a deciding factor in speeding that up.
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I don't think he was stating that Microsoft makes more secure products than everyone else.
I believe he was stating that the more secure Microsoft makes their products, the better off everyone will be.
Re:IE9 good, but still a lot of room to improve. (Score:4, Funny)
... at least until I can afford a monitor larger than 1024x768
i spit up my coffee when i read this
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i have several people at work who only run 1024x768... but then again it is either that or get e-mails from them in font 16 or some crap like that.
Increase the system DPI setting (Score:2)
i have several people at work who only run 1024x768... but then again it is either that or get e-mails from them in font 16 or some crap like that.
If you deal with visually impaired people at work, the right solution is to increase the system DPI, which will increase font sizes uniformly across all applications. Or are you talking about custom applications known to fail in high DPI?
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too many programs fail at high DPI it isn't just custom ones..
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Nah, they could change their DPI setting to get bigger text without having a tiny resolution.
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you have any idea how many program UIs fail horribly when you change to a large DPI?
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It works just fine for the web browser and terminal emulator. What else could they possibly be running :-)
Re:IE9 good, but still a lot of room to improve. (Score:5, Funny)
When your phone catches up to your desktop, it's definitely time to upgrade.
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if you are one of the 9% of Slashdot readers who actually uses IE.
I think that says it all...
Even though that sounds like a small percentage (and it kind of is) web developers cannot afford to ignore 9% (1 of 11) visitors to their sites.
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Most of us don't. We just browse the web with other choices. I browse with Chrome but I need IE9 open most of the time to debug the web apps I build. It's not a bad platform to debug with but the best tool set IMHO still resides in Firefox (Firebug). Chrome is coming up but it has, uhm, issues in the debugging tools department.
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Even the IE8 debugger (F12 - "developer tools") is really nice. I have only used FF DOM inspector sparingly since discovering it. My only real complaint with Firebug is that it can't handle a poorly designed, JavaScript-heavy site. A company I worked for (not in "web guy" capacity) was web-retarded, and their JavaScript laden, .Net platform site stopped Firebug in its tracks when debugging script.
Back on topic, we shouldn't hate IE9 simply because it comes from Microsoft. That isn't the worst reason to hate
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The good news is that Firebug has certainly influenced the debugging tools in all the other major browsers.
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Even though that sounds like a small percentage (and it kind of is) web developers cannot afford to ignore 9% (1 of 11) visitors to their sites.
Why not? Firefox was basically ignored by most developers until it hit over 20%.
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There's a cross-over point where supporting a particular browser or platform doesn't make sense - the additional work could be invested in other projects that would yield bigger returns per hour/dollar invested.
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Saying IE 6/7 in same breath considered harmful (Score:2)
The REAL nightmare is when your client want old IE6/7 to load all that state-of-art tabeless layout
In my experience, IE 7 displays basic CSS-based layout with a few minor flaws. For IE 6, on the other hand, you'll usually want to redirect the user to install the Google Chrome Frame plug-in, which uses WebKit instead of IE's built-in engine for sites that opt in to Chrome Frame using an HTTP header or meta element.
Re:IE9? Pass. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IE9? Pass. (Score:5, Funny)
As with any Linux product, by the time I've finally worked out what all the config options do, a new version will be out that deprecates all of them in favour of newer, shinier options.
Re:IE9? Pass. (Score:5, Funny)
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Chrome + IE Tab https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd [google.com]
use chrome for everything and use the tab for the crap that wants IE only..
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Don't worry. I'm sure it won't be long before it's actually easier and safer to run IE on something not made by Microsoft at all, and almost certainly done without any MS assistance, or access to any of their sourcecode.
But by then, they might have fixed the first round of bugs into a service pack, too.
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...slashdot wouldn't trump about how few corporate users visit their site.
But then that's the Linux attitude all over - not 'our userbase is one hundredth of the world', more 'our userbase has grown by 4000%!'
Is that better or worse than Microsoft's attitude? Not "Our userbase is rapidly shrinking daily", more "Our userbase is still sorta high!". It's all relative.
And why does a tech site need corporate visitors? Am I only allowed to consider technology and follow its development if I'm working in a cube at the time? Do I need to be a shareholder or a CTO to be able to think "this is kind of cool!" or "this kind of sucks!"?