5 ms·

IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. The article about how they increased JS speed is particularly interesting: http://blogs.msdn.com/

IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. The article about how they increased JS speed is particularly interesting: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/06/13/advances-in-javascript-performance-in-ie10-and-windows-8.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/06/13/advances-in-ja... What worries me is that IE11 won't be out for another year, or longer, which won't be good enough.

shdon 14y ago
True. For all the bitching about Mozilla's switch to a Chrome-like rapid release schedule as well as the "virtue" of having a stable target platform to develop against, by the time IE11 becomes reality, it'll have degraded from "really good" to "outdated" at the least.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
And yet everyday using it at work, the OS will boot, the cursor and HD will idle, I'll click IE10. I wait a few seconds and it appears to have loaded. I click in the URL bar. Wait. Okay, finally I can talk, nope, it loaded Bing and now it's stolen the focus on my text input. (Or vice-versa where the DOM is still largely unusable as IE render it). Before I get a lecture on my computer, these were on brand-new-images of Windows 8 RTM that I was using on clean, very powerful machines. Chrome is still so responsive and snappy. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the focus has been on JS and HTML5 and CSS3 but using IE still feels as much a chore as ever.
- Meai 14y ago
  What annoys me personally on IE10, is that for some reason it autocorrects some words' first letters into uppercase. I assume it assessed that I'm from a german speaking country, but it does so in all texts, english included.
- tammer 14y ago
  I think you really nailed it - MS may have solved their benchmark/compatibility problem, but does 10 solve the UX problem?
baddox 14y ago
> IE10 is really good. I feel like people have been saying that for every upcoming version if IE after IE6. It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.
- mun2mun 14y ago
  Well IE10 in Windows 8 scored first at RoboHornet web performance benchmark which is released by Google http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-browser,3307-3.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-... .
- cryptoz 14y ago
  I have a Nexus S that shipped with 2.3 and did not have smooth scrolling. Then I got the OTA for 4.0 this summer and all scrolling was totally and completely smooth. I recently updated to 4.1, and scrolling is now significantly worse than it was when the phone shipped with 2.3. > I'll believe it when I see it. I saw it. Then I didn't. I don't know what to believe any more!
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has. IE10 has IndexedDB, another major feature for apps, which only Firefox has the correct implementation of. Among other things, IE10 is not really behind any other browser except with regard to WebGL which is very unfortunate. Of course, IE10 is really good today, but might just be "good" a year from now, which its still the most recent IE version.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has. This is the problem with web development today. Until a feature is standardised enough that all of the major browsers support it or have a viable alternative available, none of these shiny new toys is really a change-the-way-you-develop type of feature for most people. In particular, no-one doing real work can use them unless they are lucky enough to be able to dictate which browser their customers/clients/colleagues should use. Still, certain browser vendors persist in releasing a new version every five minutes with yet another pre-beta-quality add-in that no-one except a handful of Internet-famous web designers writing blog posts is going to care about. The IE team release less often, which personally I think is actually a very good thing in terms of stability and building real web sites/apps, but it doesn't make their exclusive features worth any more.
ericdykstra 14y ago
Does it render websites like every other browser, or am I, as a front end developer, going to have to keep adding <!--[if IE10]>, <!--[if IE9]> etc to catch their quirks?
- richbradshaw 14y ago
  IE10 doesn't support conditional comments, which is a good indicator of their confidence that it works now. In my experience so far, if IE10 supports something, it works fine - no additional testing required.
- pippy 14y ago
  I've stopped using conditionals for anything newer than IE8. I still have to make workarounds for IE (usually by just fiddling with the CSS). IE9 is far from perfect and is still a timesink, this is time that could be spent making resources reusable or optimising content.
udp 14y ago
I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?
- joenathan 14y ago
  Yeah, and they should get rid of Office while their at it, I mean we already have Open Office, nor should they stop there they should get rid of their closed source operating system, I mean we already have open source Linux distros. They should get rid of Windows 8 and just contribute to Ubuntu!
  - willtheperson 14y ago
    But that's not the point. Let's say MS rolled V8 and Webkit into IE. They still get to build their own UI/ux and get to set the default search engine to Bing. They start contributing to webkit and everything gets faster. There are plenty of things to implement in a browser beyond the rendering engine, so why create a whole new one that web devs need to support? Removing the operating system tie-in alone would be worth it. Unfortunately MS still lives in a world where people should pay upfront for their web browser.
    - GauntletWizard 14y ago
      Please, please - Never let Microsoft contribute code to Webkit. Let them never hire a developer who has even looked at that codebase. As soon as they do, they'll roll their own propietary version, with 'extra' incompatible features, and all the bugs and security holes that come whenever Microsoft touches anything.
      - Gmo 14y ago
        That role is actually held by webkit nowadays, with webdev using only -webkit-* css properties (without including the non-prefixed one) and webkit not dropping their prefix once something has been standardized. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#questions_and_methodology https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#q... for instance
simonsarris 14y ago
IE9 and 10 are rendering my canvas test suite faster than Chrome dev or canary. I just ran the tests again: Chrome Canary: 809 tests in 15.714 seconds IE10: 809 tests in 11.383 seconds FF16: 809 tests in 26.768 seconds (wtf? this used to be on par with chrome, might be a gpu option I disabled) edit: Firefox times were off because I apparently had disabled GPU ever since this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 Unfortunately the Firefox canvas bug is still there for non-gpu users. Both FF and Chrome have ignored nearly all non-security canvas bugs that I've filed :(
- no_gravity 14y ago
  I have seen a drastic decrease in FF performance for canvas related operations too. Some time after FF12 it became about 4 times slower. Here is a little test page I made to see if it gets fixed: http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance Until it gets fixed I use chrome. Now its FF17 and its still slow.
  - shdon 14y ago
    Weird. Trying your page, I get approx 46fps on Chrome 22, 85fps on Firefox 16. Perhaps graphics card/driver related? (This is on a 5 year old Core 2 Duo at 1.86GHz, with a GeForce GT8800 on Windows 7).
  - vamur 14y ago
    Windows 7. FF 91 Chrome 53 I'm guessing you're using Linux or integrated GPU
  - akandiah 14y ago
    That's strange, I'm getting between 87-90fps on FF16 on Windows.
whatever_dude 14y ago
Yeah, but in 5 years, how good will this "good" be? We'll still be dealing with it when that time comes.
JohnsonB 14y ago
>IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. I'd have to disagree. Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Does it have in browser spell-checking? Large library of secure addons? Built in PDF viewer? Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) IE 9/10 has essentially no modern end-user features other than tabs, which are arguably ancient.
- kineticflow 14y ago
  >Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Yes. >Does it have in browser spell-checking? Yes. >Large library of secure addons? No. >Built in PDF viewer? No. (Although, Windows 8 does have a reader app) >Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) Yes. It sounds like you've never used IE10?
  - JohnsonB 14y ago
    I only checked the new features list compared to IE9 so that's why I missed spell check and sync. But it is still a huge stretch to call IE10 a good browser compared to it's competitors considering spell checking is more than half a decade old and bookmark sync has been around for more than a year, and it doesn't even have the other features on my list. It hasn't even caught up with feature leaders like Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      Isn't it more important that a browser implements, well, web browsing? I don't think any of the features you mentioned is particularly significant, relative to a robust rendering engine that supports useful technologies like HTML5 and widely accepted parts of CSS3, fast performance running JavaScript, and simply being a stable, secure product. In any case, if you're going to pick on usability features, you could just as well criticise Firefox's tabs architecture, which has horrible security and performance problems as a result of fundamental architectural flaws that every other major browser overcame years ago. Or the way Firefox and Chrome move UI elements around or subtly change their appearance with each new release. Or the way Chrome looks more like a glorified app store every six weeks after it actively circumvents the basic security model of my computer's operating system to update itself. Or plenty of other problems with mainstream browsers that IE hasn't had for years, for that matter.

shdon 14y ago

True. For all the bitching about Mozilla's switch to a Chrome-like rapid release schedule as well as the "virtue" of having a stable target platform to develop against, by the time IE11 becomes reality, it'll have degraded from "really good" to "outdated" at the least.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

And yet everyday using it at work, the OS will boot, the cursor and HD will idle, I'll click IE10. I wait a few seconds and it appears to have loaded. I click in the URL bar. Wait. Okay, finally I can talk, nope, it loaded Bing and now it's stolen the focus on my text input. (Or vice-versa where the DOM is still largely unusable as IE render it). Before I get a lecture on my computer, these were on brand-new-images of Windows 8 RTM that I was using on clean, very powerful machines. Chrome is still so responsive and snappy. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the focus has been on JS and HTML5 and CSS3 but using IE still feels as much a chore as ever.

Meai 14y ago
What annoys me personally on IE10, is that for some reason it autocorrects some words' first letters into uppercase. I assume it assessed that I'm from a german speaking country, but it does so in all texts, english included.
tammer 14y ago
I think you really nailed it - MS may have solved their benchmark/compatibility problem, but does 10 solve the UX problem?

baddox 14y ago

> IE10 is really good. I feel like people have been saying that for every upcoming version if IE after IE6. It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.

mun2mun 14y ago
Well IE10 in Windows 8 scored first at RoboHornet web performance benchmark which is released by Google http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-browser,3307-3.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-... .
cryptoz 14y ago
I have a Nexus S that shipped with 2.3 and did not have smooth scrolling. Then I got the OTA for 4.0 this summer and all scrolling was totally and completely smooth. I recently updated to 4.1, and scrolling is now significantly worse than it was when the phone shipped with 2.3. > I'll believe it when I see it. I saw it. Then I didn't. I don't know what to believe any more!
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has. IE10 has IndexedDB, another major feature for apps, which only Firefox has the correct implementation of. Among other things, IE10 is not really behind any other browser except with regard to WebGL which is very unfortunate. Of course, IE10 is really good today, but might just be "good" a year from now, which its still the most recent IE version.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has. This is the problem with web development today. Until a feature is standardised enough that all of the major browsers support it or have a viable alternative available, none of these shiny new toys is really a change-the-way-you-develop type of feature for most people. In particular, no-one doing real work can use them unless they are lucky enough to be able to dictate which browser their customers/clients/colleagues should use. Still, certain browser vendors persist in releasing a new version every five minutes with yet another pre-beta-quality add-in that no-one except a handful of Internet-famous web designers writing blog posts is going to care about. The IE team release less often, which personally I think is actually a very good thing in terms of stability and building real web sites/apps, but it doesn't make their exclusive features worth any more.

ericdykstra 14y ago

Does it render websites like every other browser, or am I, as a front end developer, going to have to keep adding <!--[if IE10]>, <!--[if IE9]> etc to catch their quirks?

richbradshaw 14y ago
IE10 doesn't support conditional comments, which is a good indicator of their confidence that it works now. In my experience so far, if IE10 supports something, it works fine - no additional testing required.
pippy 14y ago
I've stopped using conditionals for anything newer than IE8. I still have to make workarounds for IE (usually by just fiddling with the CSS). IE9 is far from perfect and is still a timesink, this is time that could be spent making resources reusable or optimising content.

udp 14y ago

I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?

joenathan 14y ago
Yeah, and they should get rid of Office while their at it, I mean we already have Open Office, nor should they stop there they should get rid of their closed source operating system, I mean we already have open source Linux distros. They should get rid of Windows 8 and just contribute to Ubuntu!
- willtheperson 14y ago
  But that's not the point. Let's say MS rolled V8 and Webkit into IE. They still get to build their own UI/ux and get to set the default search engine to Bing. They start contributing to webkit and everything gets faster. There are plenty of things to implement in a browser beyond the rendering engine, so why create a whole new one that web devs need to support? Removing the operating system tie-in alone would be worth it. Unfortunately MS still lives in a world where people should pay upfront for their web browser.
  - GauntletWizard 14y ago
    Please, please - Never let Microsoft contribute code to Webkit. Let them never hire a developer who has even looked at that codebase. As soon as they do, they'll roll their own propietary version, with 'extra' incompatible features, and all the bugs and security holes that come whenever Microsoft touches anything.
    - Gmo 14y ago
      That role is actually held by webkit nowadays, with webdev using only -webkit-* css properties (without including the non-prefixed one) and webkit not dropping their prefix once something has been standardized. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#questions_and_methodology https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#q... for instance

simonsarris 14y ago

IE9 and 10 are rendering my canvas test suite faster than Chrome dev or canary. I just ran the tests again: Chrome Canary: 809 tests in 15.714 seconds IE10: 809 tests in 11.383 seconds FF16: 809 tests in 26.768 seconds (wtf? this used to be on par with chrome, might be a gpu option I disabled) edit: Firefox times were off because I apparently had disabled GPU ever since this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 Unfortunately the Firefox canvas bug is still there for non-gpu users. Both FF and Chrome have ignored nearly all non-security canvas bugs that I've filed :(

no_gravity 14y ago
I have seen a drastic decrease in FF performance for canvas related operations too. Some time after FF12 it became about 4 times slower. Here is a little test page I made to see if it gets fixed: http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance Until it gets fixed I use chrome. Now its FF17 and its still slow.
- shdon 14y ago
  Weird. Trying your page, I get approx 46fps on Chrome 22, 85fps on Firefox 16. Perhaps graphics card/driver related? (This is on a 5 year old Core 2 Duo at 1.86GHz, with a GeForce GT8800 on Windows 7).
- vamur 14y ago
  Windows 7. FF 91 Chrome 53 I'm guessing you're using Linux or integrated GPU
- akandiah 14y ago
  That's strange, I'm getting between 87-90fps on FF16 on Windows.

whatever_dude 14y ago

Yeah, but in 5 years, how good will this "good" be? We'll still be dealing with it when that time comes.

JohnsonB 14y ago

>IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. I'd have to disagree. Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Does it have in browser spell-checking? Large library of secure addons? Built in PDF viewer? Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) IE 9/10 has essentially no modern end-user features other than tabs, which are arguably ancient.

kineticflow 14y ago
>Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Yes. >Does it have in browser spell-checking? Yes. >Large library of secure addons? No. >Built in PDF viewer? No. (Although, Windows 8 does have a reader app) >Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) Yes. It sounds like you've never used IE10?
- JohnsonB 14y ago
  I only checked the new features list compared to IE9 so that's why I missed spell check and sync. But it is still a huge stretch to call IE10 a good browser compared to it's competitors considering spell checking is more than half a decade old and bookmark sync has been around for more than a year, and it doesn't even have the other features on my list. It hasn't even caught up with feature leaders like Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Isn't it more important that a browser implements, well, web browsing? I don't think any of the features you mentioned is particularly significant, relative to a robust rendering engine that supports useful technologies like HTML5 and widely accepted parts of CSS3, fast performance running JavaScript, and simply being a stable, secure product. In any case, if you're going to pick on usability features, you could just as well criticise Firefox's tabs architecture, which has horrible security and performance problems as a result of fundamental architectural flaws that every other major browser overcame years ago. Or the way Firefox and Chrome move UI elements around or subtly change their appearance with each new release. Or the way Chrome looks more like a glorified app store every six weeks after it actively circumvents the basic security model of my computer's operating system to update itself. Or plenty of other problems with mainstream browsers that IE hasn't had for years, for that matter.