5 ms·

Using hardware acceleration in a contrived example, IE 9 is faster at rendering fish. Yawn. Nothing Microsoft does now can make up how awful IE 6,7, and 8 are a

Using hardware acceleration in a contrived example, IE 9 is faster at rendering fish. Yawn. Nothing Microsoft does now can make up how awful IE 6,7, and 8 are and the fact that most of my day-to-day pain is caused by supporting their crap-tastic browsers. Even IE 8 leaks memory like a sieve.

lhorie 16y ago
Am I the only one who's actually excited that Microsoft is actually making some very tangible improvements to the IE platform?
- davepeck 16y ago
  The "let's hate on MSFT for past browser wrongs" attitude is worrisomely common and accepted 'round these parts. It's a strange form of blindness. From where I sit, IE9 looks like a genuine attempt by MSFT to get back in the race.
melling 16y ago
Look, I really dislike Microsoft, but we're not allowed to discuss why on HN. :-) However, IE9 really can catapult the Internet to the next level by being highly standards compliant and having great performance. Let's give them credit on this one. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera competing against a strong contender from Microsoft is a great thing.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Lets give them credit when ie9 has 97%+ market share of the IE browsers. Anybody can make a nice demo, it is getting people to use it that matters.
zweben 16y ago
What's frustrating to me is that they could fix the problem of high usage of old IE versions. They just seem to be unwilling to. They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.
- patio11 16y ago
  Who to piss off: the IT department at almost every major corporation worldwide who pay us billions of dollars a year, or a bunch of bloggers who run Firefox on Macs and would still hate our bones if we cured cancer tomorrow. Decisions, decisions.
  - zweben 16y ago
    Why would IT departments be pissed off if IE9 was fully backwards compatible? Honest question.
    - patio11 16y ago
      The entire point of the suggestion is to break compatibility with IE6 so that the rest of the world can stop having to code against it. Breaking compatibility with IE6 has freaking enormous switching costs for some users. (Let me hum a few bars: you use a $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. This is hypothetical, but not very hypothetical, if you catch my drift. A forced free upgrade to IE9 would create an organization-wide emergency for that customer, instantly, and it would be a cold day in Hell before they every do business with Microsoft again.)
      - chime 16y ago
        > $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. You can make it entirely realistic by saying the company that made the CRM now has a version that supports Firefox and IE7-8 but it costs $5M to upgrade the license. I've had so many of those cases at my current job.
      - zweben 16y ago
        The entire point of my suggestion is that a newer browser doesn't need to break compatibility with older browsers to allow people to stop supporting them. Backwards compatibility makes it possible for Microsoft to do a forced upgrade without screwing anyone over. Once a significant majority people are using IE9, it doesn't matter if they're still relying on its backwards compatibility for existing websites, new websites can just target IE9's native rendering engine and ignore older versions of IE. I didn't mention IE6 backwards compatibility, because no one running IE6 is going to upgrade directly to IE9; they don't run on the same OS. Even if IE9 was made a mandatory or automatic upgrade, people relying on IE6 wouldn't have to worry. IE6 would have to be dealt with differently than IE7&8, which is fine, it'll get to insignificant market share soon enough on its own.
phoboslab 16y ago
I don't think this example is contrived. I can imagine plenty of use cases where being able to draw lots of objects is really important. Hardware acceleration is exactly what HTML5 needs in order to compete with Flash.
warfangle 16y ago
True, true. Wonder what the result would be if the video maker had tried using the WebGL extension... if this FishIE thing supports it.
orlandu63 16y ago
"Using hardware acceleration in a contrived example, IE 9 is faster at rendering fish." It's not a contrived example, as someone already pointed out. "Nothing Microsoft does now can make up how awful IE 6,7, and 8 are and the fact that most of my day-to-day pain is caused by supporting their crap-tastic browsers. Even IE 8 leaks memory like a sieve." This is entirely irrelevant. Why is this comment being upvoted?
- yesimahuman 16y ago
  The trust has been lost with a lot of developers. I guess they are going to have to earn it again.

lhorie 16y ago

Am I the only one who's actually excited that Microsoft is actually making some very tangible improvements to the IE platform?

davepeck 16y ago
The "let's hate on MSFT for past browser wrongs" attitude is worrisomely common and accepted 'round these parts. It's a strange form of blindness. From where I sit, IE9 looks like a genuine attempt by MSFT to get back in the race.

melling 16y ago

Look, I really dislike Microsoft, but we're not allowed to discuss why on HN. :-) However, IE9 really can catapult the Internet to the next level by being highly standards compliant and having great performance. Let's give them credit on this one. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera competing against a strong contender from Microsoft is a great thing.

tomjen3 16y ago
Lets give them credit when ie9 has 97%+ market share of the IE browsers. Anybody can make a nice demo, it is getting people to use it that matters.

zweben 16y ago

What's frustrating to me is that they could fix the problem of high usage of old IE versions. They just seem to be unwilling to. They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.

patio11 16y ago
Who to piss off: the IT department at almost every major corporation worldwide who pay us billions of dollars a year, or a bunch of bloggers who run Firefox on Macs and would still hate our bones if we cured cancer tomorrow. Decisions, decisions.
- zweben 16y ago
  Why would IT departments be pissed off if IE9 was fully backwards compatible? Honest question.
  - patio11 16y ago
    The entire point of the suggestion is to break compatibility with IE6 so that the rest of the world can stop having to code against it. Breaking compatibility with IE6 has freaking enormous switching costs for some users. (Let me hum a few bars: you use a $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. This is hypothetical, but not very hypothetical, if you catch my drift. A forced free upgrade to IE9 would create an organization-wide emergency for that customer, instantly, and it would be a cold day in Hell before they every do business with Microsoft again.)
    - chime 16y ago
      > $3 million CRM which only supports IE6, and the company which bought the company which made it has since folded. You can make it entirely realistic by saying the company that made the CRM now has a version that supports Firefox and IE7-8 but it costs $5M to upgrade the license. I've had so many of those cases at my current job.
    - zweben 16y ago
      The entire point of my suggestion is that a newer browser doesn't need to break compatibility with older browsers to allow people to stop supporting them. Backwards compatibility makes it possible for Microsoft to do a forced upgrade without screwing anyone over. Once a significant majority people are using IE9, it doesn't matter if they're still relying on its backwards compatibility for existing websites, new websites can just target IE9's native rendering engine and ignore older versions of IE. I didn't mention IE6 backwards compatibility, because no one running IE6 is going to upgrade directly to IE9; they don't run on the same OS. Even if IE9 was made a mandatory or automatic upgrade, people relying on IE6 wouldn't have to worry. IE6 would have to be dealt with differently than IE7&8, which is fine, it'll get to insignificant market share soon enough on its own.

phoboslab 16y ago

I don't think this example is contrived. I can imagine plenty of use cases where being able to draw lots of objects is really important. Hardware acceleration is exactly what HTML5 needs in order to compete with Flash.

warfangle 16y ago

True, true. Wonder what the result would be if the video maker had tried using the WebGL extension... if this FishIE thing supports it.

orlandu63 16y ago

"Using hardware acceleration in a contrived example, IE 9 is faster at rendering fish." It's not a contrived example, as someone already pointed out. "Nothing Microsoft does now can make up how awful IE 6,7, and 8 are and the fact that most of my day-to-day pain is caused by supporting their crap-tastic browsers. Even IE 8 leaks memory like a sieve." This is entirely irrelevant. Why is this comment being upvoted?

yesimahuman 16y ago
The trust has been lost with a lot of developers. I guess they are going to have to earn it again.