3 ms·

dom rendering speeds even up to ie8 lag far far behind what chrome and firefox have been capable off for years, everyone on the internet uses dom rendering and

dom rendering speeds even up to ie8 lag far far behind what chrome and firefox have been capable off for years, everyone on the internet uses dom rendering and RIA's are not possible without being able to do fast dom modifications, most real world performance benchmarks have problems even running in ie because it is so slow. h264 was a conscious choice, nothing "broke", I dont know which rounded corner issue you are referring to, it certainly isnt "broken" and remember you are referring to features which do not yet exist in any release of ie

Silhouette 16y ago
You make a lot of generalisations about what "everyone" is doing and how "real world" things can't run on IE. If those claims were realistic then companies with widely used web apps, such as several of Google's more recent offerings, would not be able to support IE. However, in practice it appears that these web apps run on IE just fine, and IE continues to hold the lion's share of the browser market. I don't see how to reconcile that massive, worldwide data set with your version of how web development does (or, according to you, doesn't) work. > h264 was a conscious choice, nothing "broke" That depends on whether you're the start-up pushing a video-based service and trying to make use of the HTML5 video tag, doesn't it? It used to work. In the near future, it won't. To most of us, that's a pretty good definition of "broken".
- daleharvey 16y ago
  It can hardly be disputed that 1. pretty much everyone on the web is affected by dom rendering speed, 2. dom rendering is vastly slower in ie than chrome / firefox (for their related versions) IE has a large market share, that has absolutely no correlation to its quality as a piece of software, web developers have to make their stuff work in ie because of its market share, lots of large web apps* either degrade or do not work in internet explorer even with the tremendous amount of extra effort required to develop for it comparatively to firefox + chrome * Google Wave didnt support ie, offline gmail support is firefox only? google drawings didnt work in ie last time I checked, I am sure maps degrades in parts as well
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    This is the problem: the things you claim certainly can be disputed, not least because the second hasn't been true for several versions of IE. I know, the web apps I work on do a lot of this stuff, and there has been roughly an order of magnitude improvement in performance from IE6 to IE7 and then again from IE7 to IE8, which is now close enough to the other browsers that we don't notice the difference in day-to-day use. I think you're making my point for me with the rest of your post: if you read it back, you'll see that you repeatedly contradict yourself about what does and doesn't work across different browsers, not just for IE but for Firefox vs. Chrome as well.
    - daleharvey 16y ago
      if you are going to dispute them dispute them with numbers, virtually every benchmark, independent or otherwise puts ie somewhere between bad and embarrassing http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-ie8-benchmarks/ http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-i... If you point is that we should just be happy with the web that ie6 supports then sure we wouldnt need to put up with fairly minor differences between firefox / chrome. Personally I think we are still at an early stage of realising how computing can benefit our lives, for the last 5 years ie has been significantly slowing that progress down, hopefully recent signs continue to show that this progress will happen even if we need to drag ie along the way.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        > if you are going to dispute them dispute them with numbers, virtually every benchmark, independent or otherwise puts ie somewhere between bad and embarrassing 1. Benchmarks aren't real world applications. I don't care if it takes 1s rather than 0.5s to run 1,000,000 operations, if all I ever need to do is run 5 of them. 2. The post you linked to is well over two years old. The entire web development world looked very different back then, and the possibilities of using JS and web apps for more serious work were in their infancy. At that point, Chrome did have a decisive advantage over all other browsers (not just IE) in JS execution speed, but of course that's just after Google had incorporated their new JS engine but before any of the more recent Firefox improvements and certainly not taking into account today's imminent releases like IE9. 3. I don't know what all those numbers are meant to mean, because there is no methodology information in the post you linked to. Charts and numbers without context prove nothing, rather like the "infographics" in the original article we're discussing here. 4. Even if you insist on using benchmarks, more recent ones (e.g., those highlighting jQuery 1.5 performance in some navigation features, published a few days ago) have IE9 still slower than other browsers, but more like a factor of 2-5 slower than the orders of magnitude it was just a few years ago. If they carry on improving at the rate they have been since IE7 -- keeping in mind that this seems to be one of their goals, and that the important context here is whether the IE team is following a healthy path for the future rather than whether they are better right now -- then we can expect IE10 to be directly competitive with the engines in other browsers. As an aside, those few jQuery figures are a great example of the difference between real world usage and synthetic benchmarks. jQuery is a reasonably reputable bit of software, and the difference in performance in some basic document navigation tools -- hardly high-level code, but a step up from built-in JS/DOM functionality -- was as wide between jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery 1.5 as it was between various pairs of browsers they tested. > If you point is that we should just be happy with the web that ie6 supports I've never said anything like that, anywhere in this discussion. As it happens, I do think the latest HTML5/CSS3 features tend to be more about trend-setting than actually making web development more useful. If you want to make it useful, fire the guy at the W3C who thinks CSS shouldn't have tools like named constants and arithmetic, which web developers have been asking for since forever, and which everyone from programmers to those working in DTP considers entry level. > Personally I think we are still at an early stage of realising how computing can benefit our lives, for the last 5 years ie has been significantly slowing that progress down, How is that, exactly? IE has made a small impact in the speed of development of web sites. As we've seen, with competition to drive the market, Microsoft can still develop new browsers, they just chose not to for several years after IE6. In any case, your point seems to assume that browsers are the only significant means for computers to benefit our lives, which is just crazy. If you want a disruptive technology, look at the iPhone: in just a few years, it has redefined the entire markets of both mobile computing and telecommunications, to the point where it's difficult to find any recent mobile phone that doesn't have a high-res touchscreen or any mobile platform that doesn't support installing custom software applications on the device, helping Apple climb back from relative obscurity in the PC world to one of the largest global brands in the process. By the way, IE9 supports media queries -- a recent CSS feature that does have current widespread applicability -- just fine. (Edit: Am I really being downvoted for arguing that qualitative factors and general policies/focus are more important than synthetic benchmarks, when the only quantitative data provided by the person criticising me for not citing hard numbers is one single blog post, from more than two years ago, containing a few numbers based on synthetic benchmarks, with no description of methodology to let us judge what if anything those numbers signify?)

Silhouette 16y ago

You make a lot of generalisations about what "everyone" is doing and how "real world" things can't run on IE. If those claims were realistic then companies with widely used web apps, such as several of Google's more recent offerings, would not be able to support IE. However, in practice it appears that these web apps run on IE just fine, and IE continues to hold the lion's share of the browser market. I don't see how to reconcile that massive, worldwide data set with your version of how web development does (or, according to you, doesn't) work. > h264 was a conscious choice, nothing "broke" That depends on whether you're the start-up pushing a video-based service and trying to make use of the HTML5 video tag, doesn't it? It used to work. In the near future, it won't. To most of us, that's a pretty good definition of "broken".

daleharvey 16y ago
It can hardly be disputed that 1. pretty much everyone on the web is affected by dom rendering speed, 2. dom rendering is vastly slower in ie than chrome / firefox (for their related versions) IE has a large market share, that has absolutely no correlation to its quality as a piece of software, web developers have to make their stuff work in ie because of its market share, lots of large web apps* either degrade or do not work in internet explorer even with the tremendous amount of extra effort required to develop for it comparatively to firefox + chrome * Google Wave didnt support ie, offline gmail support is firefox only? google drawings didnt work in ie last time I checked, I am sure maps degrades in parts as well
- Silhouette 16y ago
  This is the problem: the things you claim certainly can be disputed, not least because the second hasn't been true for several versions of IE. I know, the web apps I work on do a lot of this stuff, and there has been roughly an order of magnitude improvement in performance from IE6 to IE7 and then again from IE7 to IE8, which is now close enough to the other browsers that we don't notice the difference in day-to-day use. I think you're making my point for me with the rest of your post: if you read it back, you'll see that you repeatedly contradict yourself about what does and doesn't work across different browsers, not just for IE but for Firefox vs. Chrome as well.
  - daleharvey 16y ago
    if you are going to dispute them dispute them with numbers, virtually every benchmark, independent or otherwise puts ie somewhere between bad and embarrassing http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-ie8-benchmarks/ http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-i... If you point is that we should just be happy with the web that ie6 supports then sure we wouldnt need to put up with fairly minor differences between firefox / chrome. Personally I think we are still at an early stage of realising how computing can benefit our lives, for the last 5 years ie has been significantly slowing that progress down, hopefully recent signs continue to show that this progress will happen even if we need to drag ie along the way.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      > if you are going to dispute them dispute them with numbers, virtually every benchmark, independent or otherwise puts ie somewhere between bad and embarrassing 1. Benchmarks aren't real world applications. I don't care if it takes 1s rather than 0.5s to run 1,000,000 operations, if all I ever need to do is run 5 of them. 2. The post you linked to is well over two years old. The entire web development world looked very different back then, and the possibilities of using JS and web apps for more serious work were in their infancy. At that point, Chrome did have a decisive advantage over all other browsers (not just IE) in JS execution speed, but of course that's just after Google had incorporated their new JS engine but before any of the more recent Firefox improvements and certainly not taking into account today's imminent releases like IE9. 3. I don't know what all those numbers are meant to mean, because there is no methodology information in the post you linked to. Charts and numbers without context prove nothing, rather like the "infographics" in the original article we're discussing here. 4. Even if you insist on using benchmarks, more recent ones (e.g., those highlighting jQuery 1.5 performance in some navigation features, published a few days ago) have IE9 still slower than other browsers, but more like a factor of 2-5 slower than the orders of magnitude it was just a few years ago. If they carry on improving at the rate they have been since IE7 -- keeping in mind that this seems to be one of their goals, and that the important context here is whether the IE team is following a healthy path for the future rather than whether they are better right now -- then we can expect IE10 to be directly competitive with the engines in other browsers. As an aside, those few jQuery figures are a great example of the difference between real world usage and synthetic benchmarks. jQuery is a reasonably reputable bit of software, and the difference in performance in some basic document navigation tools -- hardly high-level code, but a step up from built-in JS/DOM functionality -- was as wide between jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery 1.5 as it was between various pairs of browsers they tested. > If you point is that we should just be happy with the web that ie6 supports I've never said anything like that, anywhere in this discussion. As it happens, I do think the latest HTML5/CSS3 features tend to be more about trend-setting than actually making web development more useful. If you want to make it useful, fire the guy at the W3C who thinks CSS shouldn't have tools like named constants and arithmetic, which web developers have been asking for since forever, and which everyone from programmers to those working in DTP considers entry level. > Personally I think we are still at an early stage of realising how computing can benefit our lives, for the last 5 years ie has been significantly slowing that progress down, How is that, exactly? IE has made a small impact in the speed of development of web sites. As we've seen, with competition to drive the market, Microsoft can still develop new browsers, they just chose not to for several years after IE6. In any case, your point seems to assume that browsers are the only significant means for computers to benefit our lives, which is just crazy. If you want a disruptive technology, look at the iPhone: in just a few years, it has redefined the entire markets of both mobile computing and telecommunications, to the point where it's difficult to find any recent mobile phone that doesn't have a high-res touchscreen or any mobile platform that doesn't support installing custom software applications on the device, helping Apple climb back from relative obscurity in the PC world to one of the largest global brands in the process. By the way, IE9 supports media queries -- a recent CSS feature that does have current widespread applicability -- just fine. (Edit: Am I really being downvoted for arguing that qualitative factors and general policies/focus are more important than synthetic benchmarks, when the only quantitative data provided by the person criticising me for not citing hard numbers is one single blog post, from more than two years ago, containing a few numbers based on synthetic benchmarks, with no description of methodology to let us judge what if anything those numbers signify?)