12 ms·

Is IE9 a modern browser?

378 points by etaty 16y ago

pkulak 16y ago
Whatever. The fact still remains that IE is the dominant Browser, and being the weakest link, you have to just be happy for every feature that they add or fix, because as soon as that happens, there's a hope of you actually being able to use it. If I were to say anything to the IE team it woud be, "Great job! Now keep going, please."
- wmoxam 16y ago
  For my sites IE is no longer the 'dominant browser', it's market share has fallen to ~35%, down from >50% a year ago. Of that 35%, only half is IE8 with IE 6 & 7 making up the other half. If trends continue, IE9 might constitute 10% of my total traffic in 2 or 3 years. I 'm not looking forward to supporting yet another quirky MS based browser.
  - yuhong 16y ago
    When I was talking about XHTML, I estimated that IE8 might die in 5 years after IE9 release. I mention XHTML because it is an area where IE has been the weakest link for years.
silent1mezzo 16y ago
Sadly we'll have to continue supporting inferior browsers for a long time. Don't get me wrong, IE9 is certainly a step in the right direction for Microsoft but it still doesn't stack up. Luckily there are a lot fewer hacks needed.
- nudge 16y ago
  Is there nothing to be done about this situation? I have a poll up and would be interested to hear your views: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222351 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222351
djacobs 16y ago
As far as I know, IE9 isn't planning to support WebSockets, either. How does Microsoft expect to break back into the modern browser space if IE9 doesn't even match (let alone exceed) the current offerings from Mozilla?
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  "For the client side, WebSocket was to be implemented in Firefox 4, Google Chrome 4, Opera 11 and Safari 5, as well as the mobile version of Safari in iOS 4.2.[1] However, although present, support is now disabled by default in Firefox and Opera, due to concerns over security vulnerabilities.[2][3][4]" It looks like WebSockets have issues beyond lack of support in IE. I agree on the rest, but this isn't just MS not supporting them.
  - axod 16y ago
    Even if WebSocket didn't have supposed security concerns when used with buggy web caches, I'm extremely doubtful that MS would have supported them.
    - chc 16y ago
      I agree with you, but at this point we're just axe-grinding. It's unfair to fault Microsoft for not implementing it in an alternate reality where it was a good idea to do so.
      - axod 16y ago
        It's been live, working, and providing awesomeness in Chrome for ages.
        chc 16y ago
        But not Mozilla and Opera, and Google have said they're prepared to pull support if the vulnerabilities become more than theoretical. I just don't think it's fair to single out Microsoft for not implementing something that half the browsers out there (including IE's closest rival) intentionally disabled. I wish we could have WebSockets, but it was not Microsoft's failure to implement that made them unusable in the general case.
pilif 16y ago
In earlier comments, I always cautioned people about IE9 and I just didn't trust them with actually creating a browser that works. And while I agree with the article that IE9 is still very lacking, I also just went through making the application I'm working on IE9 compliant including rounded corners and shadows plus some CSS transformations. Here's the steps I had to do: 1) don't load IE specific CSS hacks 2) don't load IE specific JS hacks 3) ? there was no step 3. So if you are not using all the latest and greatest features in HTML5, but try using the essentials, you will get a very good experience while trying to make stuff work in IE9: The features it has seem to work correctly for a change and it has enough features to be useful in many webapps. Of course it's still far away from being cutting-edge in feature support, but at least the usual crap of "try to open an existing website in a new IE version: see barely any page rendered until you add a ton of hacks" has gone. Now, if IE9 would actually run on the (still) most-used operating system (Windows XP), I would be really happy as I could tell people to get a very good experience by just upgrading their browsers (as opposed to switching browser brand).
- yuhong 16y ago
  "Of course it's still far away from being cutting-edge in feature support, but at least the usual crap of "try to open an existing website in a new IE version: see barely any page rendered until you add a ton of hacks" has gone." Yea, it is unlikely any more rendering modes are needed, because IE9's standard mode finally deserves the name.
- speleding 16y ago
  The app I needed to convert needed several JS hacks to get IE9 working. For example Number("") evaluates to NaN in IE9 while it evaluates to 0 in every other browser. It's small things like that which cause hard to find bugs.
  - GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
    Jasmine tests to the rescue :) They need to implement strict js mode in IE9. That mode really set some good rules on some weird js behaviors.
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yuhong 16y ago
"The reality is that IE9 is 2 years late. Microsoft is glad to come out with the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, SVG, and some CSS3. Like other vendors did years ago. Firefox 3.5 had the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, Geolocation, SVG in 2009. Canvas and SVG existed 5 years ago." Don't forget XHTML too.
- simonw 16y ago
  I don't think XHTML is particularly relevant to web browsers these days. It's still useful as a format for storing documents, but I don't see it going anywhere as a widespread format for sending documents to web browsers.
  - chc 16y ago
    Even on sites that claim to be serving XHTML, actual adoption is pretty low. You have to set the content type in the HTTP headers (no meta tag — the actual header) to "application/xml+xhtml" or you're actually just serving quirky HTML, and most sites don't bother, because HTML turns out to be perfectly sufficient and they don't realize they're doing it wrong (+ the old IE bugs with XHTML). For example, look at the source for W3Schools.com. Then use Firebug or curl to look at the headers. That is an HTML page that thinks it's XHTML. The poor thing is addled. At any rate, we've done without XHTML for quite some time now.
    - yuhong 16y ago
      >(+ the old IE bugs with XHTML) Yea, more precisely the lack of support, which was exactly what I was referring to in the OP. Particularly how it lasted for 11 years after XHTML 1.0 became a recommendation.
      - chc 16y ago
        Yeah, I know, which is why I didn't go into more detail to repeat your point. I was just saying, XHTML never really happened.
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simonw 16y ago
I'm pretty gutted by the lack of support for the HTML5 history API. Without that, we're doomed to polluting the Web with broken #! URLs (ala Twitter and Gawker) for the next five years.
- masklinn 16y ago
  Wouldn't an IE-only modernizer-type shim work? With some kind of redirect on sharp-urls coming from IE. More work for sure, but at least the rest gets clean resources.
- Pewpewarrows 16y ago
  I've accepted that fact and I'll just continue to serve IE9 the same degraded web pages without using the HTML5 History API. Better browsers get a better experience, IE users continue to reload the full page for each link, and everyone uses the same non-hashbang'ed URL. Sucks for IE users, but I'll just continue to not give a damn now that it's apparent IE9 won't be improved any more between now and release.
samic 16y ago
Do you really think that Micro$oft can make something modern?! they just copy Firefox with more Color and Graphics!! As they have done before with Windows, Bing, VS ,...
GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
We need more than just a blog post, we need this out and about all over the interwebs. Its absolutely true, and IE9 is now catching up to firefox 3.6 (finally) and ie10 will finally catch up to firefox 4.0 (maybe) in a year. AND the article forgot to mention that FIREFOX - ALL VERSIONS - WORK ON WINDOWS XP, VISTA, 7, MAC OSX, LINUX, UNIX. Which means that if you are a MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP user, you cannot use a Microsoft browser to freaken' browse the modern web, IE8 is the only hope. There is a lot wrong with the state of IE. And technology is only one of those things. Nothing but technology is being addressed though.
- yuhong 16y ago
  http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html
- kj12345 16y ago
  Right, and Firefox just switched to a Chrome-like iterative release schedule. The main problem with IE9 is that we're even talking about a specific version. If Chrome 9 was finalized today and a new one didn't ship for months/years, it wouldn't stand a chance feature-wise either.
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- MichaelGG 16y ago
  If I'm running Windows, why should I care that the browser doesn't work on Linux? How does that have anything to do with it being "modern"? Your last sentence makes no sense. Instead of using IE9 to view Hacker News, I should go find a native app? Huh? (I actually use Chrome and have no love for IE, but arguments like this are just silly.)
- psykotic 16y ago
  > Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all run on a variety of OSs, which is exactly what a web browser should do. What do you mean? The web itself should be accessible on a variety of platforms. It doesn't matter in the least if every platform has its own unique browser so long as they are all decently compatible. That's why we have open standards.
kenjackson 16y ago
So let me get this straight... IE9 is not a modern browser because it is on par w/ Mozilla's shipping browser? If IE stays one rev behind Mozilla in terms of standards conformance, but keeps up the great perf work they're doing then I think that's actually really good. Especially considering where they were coming from. I've been using IE9 RC (after having to revert IE9 beta -- too many bugs and issues) and it has been near flawless. I'm not sure if its a better browser than Chrome now... but its close enough that I don't miss Chrome.
- jamesgeck0 16y ago
  I don't see a problem comparing the capability of Microsoft's unreleased browser with a browser released two years ago. Although it's much more telling to compare it to Mozilla's unreleased browser. Or Chrome.
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- rimantas 16y ago
  IE is not only behind Mozilla, but behind Chrome, Safari and Opera too. And that sucks.
ecaron 16y ago
As long as http://crashie8.com/ http://crashie8.com/ crashes IE9, it shouldn't be considered a modern browser. A modern browser requires a development team that is responsive to large bugs (analogous to PHP and Java being modern languages because they quickly responded to the big-magic-number bug). None of the other "modern browsers" (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) have any crash-the-computer bugs anywhere near the scale that IE9 still has.
- newguy889 16y ago
  Are you claiming there are no crash bugs in those other browsers? I can crash Chrome tabs just by creating lots of HTML 5 audio elements in a loop. And I'm sure there's more.
  - ecaron 16y ago
    Of course not - but the crash bugs should ideally be isolated (like your Chrome crash doesn't impact other tabs), short-lived (this bug has been around since mid-2009), and not impact the operating system (only cure for the crashie8 glitch requires loading taskmgr).
    - pushtheenvelope 16y ago
      I just tried navigating to crashie8.com on IE9 RC, and while it crashed the tab (and one of the other tabs that shared the same process), nothing happened to the main IE window. The isolation seemed to work alright. Did you try this with the beta or the RC?
- noarchy 16y ago
  I know that page shouldn't crash any browser, really, but the crash happens as a result of poorly-written HTML (a missing </form> tag) that IE can't seem to handle.
  - derleth 16y ago
    Right. The thing is, web browsers are always going to have to deal with two kinds of people: The malicious and the incompetent. They both write web pages, and neither can be avoided completely. And, when you get down to it, it's impossible to distinguish sufficiently advanced incompetence from malice. (This sentiment seems quite appropriate when discussing Microsoft's browsers.)
magamiako 16y ago
Any time someone lists WebGL I usually assume they're blowing smoke. These people aren't providing the context of their rants, and instead "HEY LOOK I FOUND STUFF IE9 DOESN'T SUPPORT, IT'S NOT STANDARDS-BASED!" The reality is, HTML5 isn't even a standard yet.
jasonkester 16y ago
This reads like the Firefox team desperately trying to sound relevant, as the realization sets in that they're probably going to fade away from most people's consciousness pretty soon. Internet Explorer is, and always has been the browser that comes with your computer. It works fine, and most regular people will never bother to change it. Google Chrome is the better browser that your tech-savvy children or friend might install on your machine, and that you'll immediately notice is better in several ways and start using. Firefox used to hold that 2nd place, but now it's been relegated to "the browser that people who were really passionate about Firefox five years ago still use". It was a great alternative to IE6 back in the day, but its time has come and gone.
- DeusExMachina 16y ago
  > the realization set is that they're probably going to fade away from most people's consciousness pretty soon. How do you support this statement? It looks to me that Firefox still has a significant market share and I don't see it declining. On the contrary, it recently overtook IE in Europe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066540 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066540 > Internet Explorer is, and always has been the browser that comes with your computer. It works fine, and most regular people will never bother to change it. Here in Europe Microsoft is compelled by antitrust to let people select a different browser the first time (I don't know if they are already enforcing it though). "It works fine" is of course subjective, but it's true that when people start with it they usually do not bother changing (also because they don't know they can). > Firefox used to hold that 2nd place, but now it's been relegated to "the browser that people who were really passionate about Firefox five years ago still use". I don't think so. I see a lot of people still using it on it's merits and not on "passion". Where do you take this statement?
- sid0 16y ago
  Plenty of tech-savvy people I know in real life think that Chrome has a terrible UX. There's no way they're going to be installing it on anyone else's computer. (How do you move the refresh button to the right of the address bar?) edit: to elaborate, the principle Chrome seems to work on is responsiveness above all else. I'm not sure responsiveness is the most important barometer for good UX in non-Western cultures. For instance, there's no way I can sacrifice the ability to customize my UI for slightly improved responsiveness.
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markkanof 16y ago
Microsoft really needs to break away from the major version number releases for IE and go with an iterative approach like Google does with Chrome. For something like Windows or Office it probobly still makes sense to have major version releases because for the average computer user a new major version number means there are a bunch of new features and that they should consider upgrading. But Internet Explorer is a free product. I don't see the marketing value in only releasing major version numbers. Instead they should be constantly pushing out new stuff. At least in my opinion, that would still provide the feeling of having something fresh and new if I was receiving a constant stream of new features and bug fixes. Even if they did get every conceivable feature implemented for IE9, it would only be current for a short time after the release. It would then sit basically unchanged for a year or more (thus seeming old and outdated) while they work on IE10. Meanwhile Chrome would have put out a ton of new features that are all added a few at a time.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Unfortunately they likely won't due to IE being big in the enterprise. This is also why they tend to not add features in between revs, just bug fixes. And even then they won't fix a standards comformance bug unless there's a security issue. Enterprise users want to be able to say, "Use IE9 to access your expense reports, period". They don't want it to be "Use IE9.0.1.2.1.a or above" or "IE9 shipped before 10/1/2011". Pushback from the enterprise is probably driving this more than anything else. They could go to a model where they have a consumer and enterprise branch. And the enterprise branch syns up with the consumer branch on major releases. But that starts to sound a little chaotic (but I think doable).
  - yuhong 16y ago
    But I'd suggest at least doing a IE 9.5.
  - noibl 16y ago
    > Enterprise users want to be able to say, "Use IE9 to access your expense reports, period". Every time people bring this up they make it sound like it's a legitimate requirement. It's not, and the cost of supporting a given browser's rolling release schedule in-house at these companies is miniscule compared to the global cost to the web development industry and user productivity of having to support three (possibly four) different versions of IE at any one time.
nkassis 16y ago
Lack of WebGL support is a real bummer but realistically WebGL came to late for the IE9 release cycle. Also, I don't think Microsoft plans on supporting in in IE10. Afraid of the competition with their own tech I guess. I'm getting all my user to switch to chrome and firefox 4, I haven't gotten a lot of complaint about it. (none actually so far)
Silhouette 16y ago
This is just a troll post getting way too much attention. Let's consider a few facts to put it in perspective. Firstly, neither IE 9 nor Firefox 4 has been released, and neither HTML5 nor CSS3 is a standard, nor will either be for several years at a minimum. The entire argument in this post boils down to not liking one experimental piece of software over another because the author's personal preferences for experimental features are not supported. Secondly, when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version while Firefox has been getting worse. If you want to talk about modern browsers in a useful way, instead of about bleeding edge features that no-one will be using on mainstream web sites for a while anyway, consider that Firefox is the only one of the major browsers that does not handle each tab independently, leading to obvious performance and security problems. Thirdly, the trend for Google and now apparently Mozilla to release updates every few weeks is not necessarily a good thing. The major advantage is supposedly that it allows browsers to develop faster, but as any Linux advocate can tell you, it's no good having a great platform if no-one is building great stuff on top of it. For developers, automated updates every few weeks are often unhelpful, because you're always trying to test against a moving target. When you have to deal with inconvenient realities like contracts and customer approvals on major projects, it's now almost impossible to include testing against Chrome and soon Firefox because you don't even have a stable version to use as a basis for tests. I have no problem with pushing security patches more regularly, but they shouldn't be changing functionality and obviously Microsoft does this for IE anyway. Maybe I'm just weird, but I consider issues like performance, reliability, and having a stable foundation to build on to be far more important than supporting your own browser's take on some hypothetical future "standard", which is just IE vs. Netscape all over again. On that basis, IE is currently the only one of the big three that is actually going in the right direction. It's just a shame they're not providing it on XP.
- fabjan 16y ago
  > Secondly, when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version Really? I use IE 8 at work and opening a new empty tab takes ten seconds. I'd hate to see what it was like in 7.
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Luff 16y ago
Woah, am I the only one who loves the work that has been done with IE9? Their new rendering engine is sick, Microsoft must have stolen personal from their DirectX team to work on it. Everything is hardware accelerated, the anti-aliased fonts look great, Flash video playback of 1080p uses just a few percents of CPU, something that max out a whole core for me in FF or Chrome. Same thing with moving / fading / modifying elements with JQuery.animate(), super smooth and uses almost no CPU. I'm still a die-hard fan of Firefox because of all the plugins, but damn I wish everyone were using rendering engines as good as the one in IE9. I hope FF and Chrome will close this gap soon.
- sid0 16y ago
  On Windows Vista and 7, Firefox 4 uses the same rendering engine (Direct3D/Direct2D/DirectWrite) that IE does.
  - Lennie 16y ago
    Even with hardware acceleration in IE9 and Firefox 4 enabled, Firefox 4 is still faster than IE9: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/460/ http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/460/
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Unlike on OSX, IE can only use publicly disclosed APIs. Anything IE can do, Firefox can also do in Windows. On OSX Safari can, in theory, access acceleration that no one else can. Although I don't know if they do.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  In chrome you can go to about:flags and enable GPU accelerated rendering. That's in the stable builds, in beta or dev builds it may well be on by default now.
  - sid0 16y ago
    That's only compositing acceleration though: I don't think Chrome does content acceleration yet.
KeyBoardG 16y ago
I stay away from these types or articles. It is impossible to get an unbiased flamewar starter writeup. Nor do I really care. IE9 works great for me and I like they new rendering engine and javascript compilation to native code.
suyash 16y ago
Nice analysis by Mozilla..but I still would go with Chrome 9!
tobylane 16y ago
FF3 certainly isn't, can Mozilla just shut up and stop?
Synaesthesia 16y ago
IE9 is a huge improvement over previous versions. The big improvement in IE9 is the attitude that MS have with the browser. Clearly good HTML5 support is a big goal of Microsoft's, as well as speed, stability and javascript performance. These things were just not there before. Sure the feature set is still somewhat lacking but they are developing at a great pace. At this rate it will soon be a true competitor to the modern browsers.
tlammens 16y ago
They can't even let: body and/or element { width:100%; height: 100%; } which is css 1, behave properly. While chrome, firefox en safari behave as I would expect it to be. Example @ http://www.gamenull.com/ http://www.gamenull.com/ :-(
shad42 16y ago
All articles from Mozilla (especially from Europe) are usually not objective, they always tend to make some buzz around Firefox. Personally I use Chrome, and used Firefox before. I am not personally familiar with all stuff from MSFT, but I won't take Paul Rouget's trolls into account to make me an objective opinion.
devongovett 16y ago
I added some annotations to the infographic. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/534786/ie9_vs_fx4.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/534786/ie9_vs_fx4.html While I love the new stuff being implemented in cutting edge browsers like Firefox, IE9 is a huge step up from IE8. Microsoft had to choose what to implement, and choosing stuff that isn't likely to change soon makes sense for them. We shouldn't be expecting them to implement everything all at once. Here's to more frequent updates to IE that bring these new features once they are more fully developed!
sathishmanohar 16y ago
Its sad, many developers tend to use features that is supported by all browsers, So, it may take a while for all the cool CSS3 gradients and animations to go main-stream, just because of IE9.
thenonhacker 16y ago
Check this out guys! A reply to Mozilla: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/02/15/a-modern-browser.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/02/15/a-modern-bro...
shimondoodkin 16y ago
http://habreffect.ru/files/a9d/72856cf6c/242622165.png http://habreffect.ru/files/a9d/72856cf6c/242622165.png

378 points by etaty 16y ago

Whatever. The fact still remains that IE is the dominant Browser, and being the weakest link, you have to just be happy for every feature that they add or fix, because as soon as that happens, there's a hope of you actually being able to use it. If I were to say anything to the IE team it woud be, "Great job! Now keep going, please."

wmoxam 16y ago
For my sites IE is no longer the 'dominant browser', it's market share has fallen to ~35%, down from >50% a year ago. Of that 35%, only half is IE8 with IE 6 & 7 making up the other half. If trends continue, IE9 might constitute 10% of my total traffic in 2 or 3 years. I 'm not looking forward to supporting yet another quirky MS based browser.
- yuhong 16y ago
  When I was talking about XHTML, I estimated that IE8 might die in 5 years after IE9 release. I mention XHTML because it is an area where IE has been the weakest link for years.

silent1mezzo 16y ago

Sadly we'll have to continue supporting inferior browsers for a long time. Don't get me wrong, IE9 is certainly a step in the right direction for Microsoft but it still doesn't stack up. Luckily there are a lot fewer hacks needed.

nudge 16y ago
Is there nothing to be done about this situation? I have a poll up and would be interested to hear your views: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222351 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222351

djacobs 16y ago

As far as I know, IE9 isn't planning to support WebSockets, either. How does Microsoft expect to break back into the modern browser space if IE9 doesn't even match (let alone exceed) the current offerings from Mozilla?

jokermatt999 16y ago
"For the client side, WebSocket was to be implemented in Firefox 4, Google Chrome 4, Opera 11 and Safari 5, as well as the mobile version of Safari in iOS 4.2.[1] However, although present, support is now disabled by default in Firefox and Opera, due to concerns over security vulnerabilities.[2][3][4]" It looks like WebSockets have issues beyond lack of support in IE. I agree on the rest, but this isn't just MS not supporting them.
- axod 16y ago
  Even if WebSocket didn't have supposed security concerns when used with buggy web caches, I'm extremely doubtful that MS would have supported them.
  - chc 16y ago
    I agree with you, but at this point we're just axe-grinding. It's unfair to fault Microsoft for not implementing it in an alternate reality where it was a good idea to do so.
    - axod 16y ago
      It's been live, working, and providing awesomeness in Chrome for ages.
      - chc 16y ago
        But not Mozilla and Opera, and Google have said they're prepared to pull support if the vulnerabilities become more than theoretical. I just don't think it's fair to single out Microsoft for not implementing something that half the browsers out there (including IE's closest rival) intentionally disabled. I wish we could have WebSockets, but it was not Microsoft's failure to implement that made them unusable in the general case.

pilif 16y ago

In earlier comments, I always cautioned people about IE9 and I just didn't trust them with actually creating a browser that works. And while I agree with the article that IE9 is still very lacking, I also just went through making the application I'm working on IE9 compliant including rounded corners and shadows plus some CSS transformations. Here's the steps I had to do: 1) don't load IE specific CSS hacks 2) don't load IE specific JS hacks 3) ? there was no step 3. So if you are not using all the latest and greatest features in HTML5, but try using the essentials, you will get a very good experience while trying to make stuff work in IE9: The features it has seem to work correctly for a change and it has enough features to be useful in many webapps. Of course it's still far away from being cutting-edge in feature support, but at least the usual crap of "try to open an existing website in a new IE version: see barely any page rendered until you add a ton of hacks" has gone. Now, if IE9 would actually run on the (still) most-used operating system (Windows XP), I would be really happy as I could tell people to get a very good experience by just upgrading their browsers (as opposed to switching browser brand).

yuhong 16y ago
"Of course it's still far away from being cutting-edge in feature support, but at least the usual crap of "try to open an existing website in a new IE version: see barely any page rendered until you add a ton of hacks" has gone." Yea, it is unlikely any more rendering modes are needed, because IE9's standard mode finally deserves the name.
speleding 16y ago
The app I needed to convert needed several JS hacks to get IE9 working. For example Number("") evaluates to NaN in IE9 while it evaluates to 0 in every other browser. It's small things like that which cause hard to find bugs.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  Jasmine tests to the rescue :) They need to implement strict js mode in IE9. That mode really set some good rules on some weird js behaviors.
- 16y ago

yuhong 16y ago

"The reality is that IE9 is 2 years late. Microsoft is glad to come out with the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, SVG, and some CSS3. Like other vendors did years ago. Firefox 3.5 had the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, Geolocation, SVG in 2009. Canvas and SVG existed 5 years ago." Don't forget XHTML too.

simonw 16y ago
I don't think XHTML is particularly relevant to web browsers these days. It's still useful as a format for storing documents, but I don't see it going anywhere as a widespread format for sending documents to web browsers.
- chc 16y ago
  Even on sites that claim to be serving XHTML, actual adoption is pretty low. You have to set the content type in the HTTP headers (no meta tag — the actual header) to "application/xml+xhtml" or you're actually just serving quirky HTML, and most sites don't bother, because HTML turns out to be perfectly sufficient and they don't realize they're doing it wrong (+ the old IE bugs with XHTML). For example, look at the source for W3Schools.com. Then use Firebug or curl to look at the headers. That is an HTML page that thinks it's XHTML. The poor thing is addled. At any rate, we've done without XHTML for quite some time now.
  - yuhong 16y ago
    >(+ the old IE bugs with XHTML) Yea, more precisely the lack of support, which was exactly what I was referring to in the OP. Particularly how it lasted for 11 years after XHTML 1.0 became a recommendation.
    - chc 16y ago
      Yeah, I know, which is why I didn't go into more detail to repeat your point. I was just saying, XHTML never really happened.
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simonw 16y ago

I'm pretty gutted by the lack of support for the HTML5 history API. Without that, we're doomed to polluting the Web with broken #! URLs (ala Twitter and Gawker) for the next five years.

masklinn 16y ago
Wouldn't an IE-only modernizer-type shim work? With some kind of redirect on sharp-urls coming from IE. More work for sure, but at least the rest gets clean resources.
Pewpewarrows 16y ago
I've accepted that fact and I'll just continue to serve IE9 the same degraded web pages without using the HTML5 History API. Better browsers get a better experience, IE users continue to reload the full page for each link, and everyone uses the same non-hashbang'ed URL. Sucks for IE users, but I'll just continue to not give a damn now that it's apparent IE9 won't be improved any more between now and release.

samic 16y ago

Do you really think that Micro$oft can make something modern?! they just copy Firefox with more Color and Graphics!! As they have done before with Windows, Bing, VS ,...

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago

We need more than just a blog post, we need this out and about all over the interwebs. Its absolutely true, and IE9 is now catching up to firefox 3.6 (finally) and ie10 will finally catch up to firefox 4.0 (maybe) in a year. AND the article forgot to mention that FIREFOX - ALL VERSIONS - WORK ON WINDOWS XP, VISTA, 7, MAC OSX, LINUX, UNIX. Which means that if you are a MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP user, you cannot use a Microsoft browser to freaken' browse the modern web, IE8 is the only hope. There is a lot wrong with the state of IE. And technology is only one of those things. Nothing but technology is being addressed though.

yuhong 16y ago
http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html
kj12345 16y ago
Right, and Firefox just switched to a Chrome-like iterative release schedule. The main problem with IE9 is that we're even talking about a specific version. If Chrome 9 was finalized today and a new one didn't ship for months/years, it wouldn't stand a chance feature-wise either.

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MichaelGG 16y ago
If I'm running Windows, why should I care that the browser doesn't work on Linux? How does that have anything to do with it being "modern"? Your last sentence makes no sense. Instead of using IE9 to view Hacker News, I should go find a native app? Huh? (I actually use Chrome and have no love for IE, but arguments like this are just silly.)
psykotic 16y ago
> Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all run on a variety of OSs, which is exactly what a web browser should do. What do you mean? The web itself should be accessible on a variety of platforms. It doesn't matter in the least if every platform has its own unique browser so long as they are all decently compatible. That's why we have open standards.

kenjackson 16y ago

So let me get this straight... IE9 is not a modern browser because it is on par w/ Mozilla's shipping browser? If IE stays one rev behind Mozilla in terms of standards conformance, but keeps up the great perf work they're doing then I think that's actually really good. Especially considering where they were coming from. I've been using IE9 RC (after having to revert IE9 beta -- too many bugs and issues) and it has been near flawless. I'm not sure if its a better browser than Chrome now... but its close enough that I don't miss Chrome.

jamesgeck0 16y ago
I don't see a problem comparing the capability of Microsoft's unreleased browser with a browser released two years ago. Although it's much more telling to compare it to Mozilla's unreleased browser. Or Chrome.
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rimantas 16y ago
IE is not only behind Mozilla, but behind Chrome, Safari and Opera too. And that sucks.

ecaron 16y ago

As long as http://crashie8.com/ http://crashie8.com/ crashes IE9, it shouldn't be considered a modern browser. A modern browser requires a development team that is responsive to large bugs (analogous to PHP and Java being modern languages because they quickly responded to the big-magic-number bug). None of the other "modern browsers" (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) have any crash-the-computer bugs anywhere near the scale that IE9 still has.

newguy889 16y ago
Are you claiming there are no crash bugs in those other browsers? I can crash Chrome tabs just by creating lots of HTML 5 audio elements in a loop. And I'm sure there's more.
- ecaron 16y ago
  Of course not - but the crash bugs should ideally be isolated (like your Chrome crash doesn't impact other tabs), short-lived (this bug has been around since mid-2009), and not impact the operating system (only cure for the crashie8 glitch requires loading taskmgr).
  - pushtheenvelope 16y ago
    I just tried navigating to crashie8.com on IE9 RC, and while it crashed the tab (and one of the other tabs that shared the same process), nothing happened to the main IE window. The isolation seemed to work alright. Did you try this with the beta or the RC?
noarchy 16y ago
I know that page shouldn't crash any browser, really, but the crash happens as a result of poorly-written HTML (a missing </form> tag) that IE can't seem to handle.
- derleth 16y ago
  Right. The thing is, web browsers are always going to have to deal with two kinds of people: The malicious and the incompetent. They both write web pages, and neither can be avoided completely. And, when you get down to it, it's impossible to distinguish sufficiently advanced incompetence from malice. (This sentiment seems quite appropriate when discussing Microsoft's browsers.)

magamiako 16y ago

Any time someone lists WebGL I usually assume they're blowing smoke. These people aren't providing the context of their rants, and instead "HEY LOOK I FOUND STUFF IE9 DOESN'T SUPPORT, IT'S NOT STANDARDS-BASED!" The reality is, HTML5 isn't even a standard yet.

jasonkester 16y ago

This reads like the Firefox team desperately trying to sound relevant, as the realization sets in that they're probably going to fade away from most people's consciousness pretty soon. Internet Explorer is, and always has been the browser that comes with your computer. It works fine, and most regular people will never bother to change it. Google Chrome is the better browser that your tech-savvy children or friend might install on your machine, and that you'll immediately notice is better in several ways and start using. Firefox used to hold that 2nd place, but now it's been relegated to "the browser that people who were really passionate about Firefox five years ago still use". It was a great alternative to IE6 back in the day, but its time has come and gone.

DeusExMachina 16y ago
> the realization set is that they're probably going to fade away from most people's consciousness pretty soon. How do you support this statement? It looks to me that Firefox still has a significant market share and I don't see it declining. On the contrary, it recently overtook IE in Europe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066540 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066540 > Internet Explorer is, and always has been the browser that comes with your computer. It works fine, and most regular people will never bother to change it. Here in Europe Microsoft is compelled by antitrust to let people select a different browser the first time (I don't know if they are already enforcing it though). "It works fine" is of course subjective, but it's true that when people start with it they usually do not bother changing (also because they don't know they can). > Firefox used to hold that 2nd place, but now it's been relegated to "the browser that people who were really passionate about Firefox five years ago still use". I don't think so. I see a lot of people still using it on it's merits and not on "passion". Where do you take this statement?
sid0 16y ago
Plenty of tech-savvy people I know in real life think that Chrome has a terrible UX. There's no way they're going to be installing it on anyone else's computer. (How do you move the refresh button to the right of the address bar?) edit: to elaborate, the principle Chrome seems to work on is responsiveness above all else. I'm not sure responsiveness is the most important barometer for good UX in non-Western cultures. For instance, there's no way I can sacrifice the ability to customize my UI for slightly improved responsiveness.

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markkanof 16y ago

Microsoft really needs to break away from the major version number releases for IE and go with an iterative approach like Google does with Chrome. For something like Windows or Office it probobly still makes sense to have major version releases because for the average computer user a new major version number means there are a bunch of new features and that they should consider upgrading. But Internet Explorer is a free product. I don't see the marketing value in only releasing major version numbers. Instead they should be constantly pushing out new stuff. At least in my opinion, that would still provide the feeling of having something fresh and new if I was receiving a constant stream of new features and bug fixes. Even if they did get every conceivable feature implemented for IE9, it would only be current for a short time after the release. It would then sit basically unchanged for a year or more (thus seeming old and outdated) while they work on IE10. Meanwhile Chrome would have put out a ton of new features that are all added a few at a time.

kenjackson 16y ago
Unfortunately they likely won't due to IE being big in the enterprise. This is also why they tend to not add features in between revs, just bug fixes. And even then they won't fix a standards comformance bug unless there's a security issue. Enterprise users want to be able to say, "Use IE9 to access your expense reports, period". They don't want it to be "Use IE9.0.1.2.1.a or above" or "IE9 shipped before 10/1/2011". Pushback from the enterprise is probably driving this more than anything else. They could go to a model where they have a consumer and enterprise branch. And the enterprise branch syns up with the consumer branch on major releases. But that starts to sound a little chaotic (but I think doable).
- yuhong 16y ago
  But I'd suggest at least doing a IE 9.5.
- noibl 16y ago
  > Enterprise users want to be able to say, "Use IE9 to access your expense reports, period". Every time people bring this up they make it sound like it's a legitimate requirement. It's not, and the cost of supporting a given browser's rolling release schedule in-house at these companies is miniscule compared to the global cost to the web development industry and user productivity of having to support three (possibly four) different versions of IE at any one time.

nkassis 16y ago

Lack of WebGL support is a real bummer but realistically WebGL came to late for the IE9 release cycle. Also, I don't think Microsoft plans on supporting in in IE10. Afraid of the competition with their own tech I guess. I'm getting all my user to switch to chrome and firefox 4, I haven't gotten a lot of complaint about it. (none actually so far)

Silhouette 16y ago

This is just a troll post getting way too much attention. Let's consider a few facts to put it in perspective. Firstly, neither IE 9 nor Firefox 4 has been released, and neither HTML5 nor CSS3 is a standard, nor will either be for several years at a minimum. The entire argument in this post boils down to not liking one experimental piece of software over another because the author's personal preferences for experimental features are not supported. Secondly, when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version while Firefox has been getting worse. If you want to talk about modern browsers in a useful way, instead of about bleeding edge features that no-one will be using on mainstream web sites for a while anyway, consider that Firefox is the only one of the major browsers that does not handle each tab independently, leading to obvious performance and security problems. Thirdly, the trend for Google and now apparently Mozilla to release updates every few weeks is not necessarily a good thing. The major advantage is supposedly that it allows browsers to develop faster, but as any Linux advocate can tell you, it's no good having a great platform if no-one is building great stuff on top of it. For developers, automated updates every few weeks are often unhelpful, because you're always trying to test against a moving target. When you have to deal with inconvenient realities like contracts and customer approvals on major projects, it's now almost impossible to include testing against Chrome and soon Firefox because you don't even have a stable version to use as a basis for tests. I have no problem with pushing security patches more regularly, but they shouldn't be changing functionality and obviously Microsoft does this for IE anyway. Maybe I'm just weird, but I consider issues like performance, reliability, and having a stable foundation to build on to be far more important than supporting your own browser's take on some hypothetical future "standard", which is just IE vs. Netscape all over again. On that basis, IE is currently the only one of the big three that is actually going in the right direction. It's just a shame they're not providing it on XP.

fabjan 16y ago
> Secondly, when it comes to performance, IE has been getting better with every version Really? I use IE 8 at work and opening a new empty tab takes ten seconds. I'd hate to see what it was like in 7.
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Luff 16y ago

Woah, am I the only one who loves the work that has been done with IE9? Their new rendering engine is sick, Microsoft must have stolen personal from their DirectX team to work on it. Everything is hardware accelerated, the anti-aliased fonts look great, Flash video playback of 1080p uses just a few percents of CPU, something that max out a whole core for me in FF or Chrome. Same thing with moving / fading / modifying elements with JQuery.animate(), super smooth and uses almost no CPU. I'm still a die-hard fan of Firefox because of all the plugins, but damn I wish everyone were using rendering engines as good as the one in IE9. I hope FF and Chrome will close this gap soon.

sid0 16y ago
On Windows Vista and 7, Firefox 4 uses the same rendering engine (Direct3D/Direct2D/DirectWrite) that IE does.
- Lennie 16y ago
  Even with hardware acceleration in IE9 and Firefox 4 enabled, Firefox 4 is still faster than IE9: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/460/ http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/460/
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Unlike on OSX, IE can only use publicly disclosed APIs. Anything IE can do, Firefox can also do in Windows. On OSX Safari can, in theory, access acceleration that no one else can. Although I don't know if they do.
JonnieCache 16y ago
In chrome you can go to about:flags and enable GPU accelerated rendering. That's in the stable builds, in beta or dev builds it may well be on by default now.
- sid0 16y ago
  That's only compositing acceleration though: I don't think Chrome does content acceleration yet.

KeyBoardG 16y ago

I stay away from these types or articles. It is impossible to get an unbiased flamewar starter writeup. Nor do I really care. IE9 works great for me and I like they new rendering engine and javascript compilation to native code.

suyash 16y ago

Nice analysis by Mozilla..but I still would go with Chrome 9!

tobylane 16y ago

FF3 certainly isn't, can Mozilla just shut up and stop?

Synaesthesia 16y ago

IE9 is a huge improvement over previous versions. The big improvement in IE9 is the attitude that MS have with the browser. Clearly good HTML5 support is a big goal of Microsoft's, as well as speed, stability and javascript performance. These things were just not there before. Sure the feature set is still somewhat lacking but they are developing at a great pace. At this rate it will soon be a true competitor to the modern browsers.

tlammens 16y ago

They can't even let: body and/or element { width:100%; height: 100%; } which is css 1, behave properly. While chrome, firefox en safari behave as I would expect it to be. Example @ http://www.gamenull.com/ http://www.gamenull.com/ :-(

shad42 16y ago

All articles from Mozilla (especially from Europe) are usually not objective, they always tend to make some buzz around Firefox. Personally I use Chrome, and used Firefox before. I am not personally familiar with all stuff from MSFT, but I won't take Paul Rouget's trolls into account to make me an objective opinion.

devongovett 16y ago

I added some annotations to the infographic. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/534786/ie9_vs_fx4.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/534786/ie9_vs_fx4.html While I love the new stuff being implemented in cutting edge browsers like Firefox, IE9 is a huge step up from IE8. Microsoft had to choose what to implement, and choosing stuff that isn't likely to change soon makes sense for them. We shouldn't be expecting them to implement everything all at once. Here's to more frequent updates to IE that bring these new features once they are more fully developed!

sathishmanohar 16y ago

Its sad, many developers tend to use features that is supported by all browsers, So, it may take a while for all the cool CSS3 gradients and animations to go main-stream, just because of IE9.

thenonhacker 16y ago

Check this out guys! A reply to Mozilla: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/02/15/a-modern-browser.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/02/15/a-modern-bro...

shimondoodkin 16y ago

http://habreffect.ru/files/a9d/72856cf6c/242622165.png http://habreffect.ru/files/a9d/72856cf6c/242622165.png