6 ms·

An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

88 points by johns 17y ago

psyklic 17y ago
The thing that shocked me the most was reading that Direct2D which can be used in place of GDI+. IMO, Microsoft should have made available a hardware-accelerated 2D library a LONG time ago ... before this, you had to use Direct3D to attain hardware acceleration, which was always far too much of a hassle just to render some 2D graphics.
drcode 17y ago
:( still no canvas or svg... jerks.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  At least it's almost as fast as the slowest competitor...
  - drcode 17y ago
    Yeah, I love how they say IE is no longer an "outlier." They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      I am shocked you would expect an honest report from Microsoft, about a very important product during the heavy media coverage of the PDC
    - mdemare 17y ago
      They did show how IE8 is orders of magnitude slower than its competitors - that display of honesty shocked me a little.
      - neilk 17y ago
        They admit the flaws when the next version is about to come out. Standard operating procedure for marketing.
        rbanffy 17y ago
        That's the only reason we have to imagine IE9 will be released soon. Had it been a "minor improvement" over IE8 and were it aimed squarely as a competitor to Chrome or Firefox, I would doubt it would ever launch. Just preventing companies from rewriting internal web apps to be more cross-browser-friendly would be sufficient accomplishment.
    - billybob 17y ago
      I'm looking for the trickery, and I haven't spotted it yet. Can you elaborate?
      - unfletch 17y ago
        I think he's speaking of y-axis' scale. Using such a large scale and including older versions of IE makes IE 9 look downright fast. If you plotted just the rightmost cluster (IE 9, FF 3.6, WebKit nightly) on its own graph with a scale that went from 0 to, say, 1500 instead of 16000, it would be very clear that IE 9 is still slow compared to it's peers -- nearly 3x slower than WebKit as noted by the earlier comment. It's quite an improvement, but here's hoping they keep optimizing.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      Also, Firefox already gets snippy with Webkit because they bail on dealing with difficult corner cases (the page showing the HTML5 spec itself being a recent example), then trumpet how fast they are. Let's see how fast IE9 is when it actually supports the standards properly.
- rufo 17y ago
  No mention on if they actually, truly, really support transparent PNGs this time around, either. (If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent PNG....)
  - etherealG 17y ago
    that's a bug in their implementation of opacity, not of png. they don't support existing alpha in their opacity calculations.
    - rufo 17y ago
      Whoops, you're right. I hadn't really read in-depth when I ran into this several months ago, and I was rather peeved at the time regardless. It doesn't really matter though - the point is, they still have a long way to go before they can earn back the trust they've squandered amongst the web development community.
bugs 17y ago
I wonder when or even if the attitude seen in the comments will spread out to the rest of the computer community. (IE is the devil)
dschobel 17y ago
Maybe I'm just an optimist but I'm really glad to see that MS is even looking at the Acid3 and SunSpider tests as important metrics.
- notauser 17y ago
  If only we weren't going to have to live with IE6 until 2020. Then we might be able to use more of the new stuff. (Apologies for bitterness, I spent a lot of today back porting a Very Large Web App to IE6.)
- billybob 17y ago
  Me too. Not that they have much choice. Even the non-geeks in my office have noticed that they can work faster with Firefox. As more things move to the web, built on web standards, they can't afford to continue having the worst browser by far.
  - cracell 17y ago
    To be far. IE8 is vastly better then IE7 and IE6 but Microsoft is not aggressive about getting it's users to upgrade. Whereas Firefox, Safari and especially Chrome are.
- mpk 17y ago
  Microsoft's efforts towards (de facto or de jure) standards compliance are dismal. I've been working on a client-side app since before IE7 came out. The much hyped IE7 release gave us some performance benefits, but apart from that it just added another IE release that had to be tested and tested. IE8 made things even worse. We now have scenarios that work fine in all recent (going back 1 to 3 major versions, you know, everything over the last few years) of Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but IE? Hahaha, you must be joking. It works in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7. Or just in IE8, or in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7... And now they're threatening to unleash yet another IE version. Why couldn't they just stick with IE8 for the time being and fix things there? (And don't tell me 'the version number is just marketing', we all know that major releases entail lots and lots of changes and 'fixing things we messed up before').
anigbrowl 17y ago
I see a (brief) mention of HTML5 compliance; I'm not sure if it's significant that Chrome beta fails many of the tests at http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5.htm http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5.htm
pierrefar 17y ago
I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.
- shiranaihito 17y ago
  I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.
  - billybob 17y ago
    Give it time.
  - shiranaihito 17y ago
    Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon. OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit? I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe). See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk about anything that really matters in the world.
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      Saying "lololol M$ i hope they die" is frowned upon. Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it. Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major products and access to give feedback to people who care. Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil', just the inertia of a huge company). You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
      - shiranaihito 17y ago
        Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it. Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to tell me why they're all invalid? I've done this kind of thing before, and every time someone disparages MS here, he's treading on thin ice. There will always be MS-apologists around. Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years They sure have made a show of being more "open" to please/distract programmers, that's all. You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter. I realize this is something that people don't want to hear, and can't process without adjusting their conceptions of things, but that doesn't make it any less true. Want some content? Here's a video of angry muslims in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20. One of the signs they're proudly displaying says "Europe, you will pay. Your annihilation is on its way!!!". Does that sound a tad threatening to you? That protest is probably related to events in 2004, when they actually killed a Dutch film director, Theo Van Gogh, for releasing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 .. Yes, they killed a man for making a short movie. The average muslim you meet will most likely tell you that Islam is a "religion of peace", but what they don't mention is that if you say otherwise, they'll kill you. If it's such a mellow religion, why is there a protest full of its followers waving signs saying that they'll destroy Europe then? Western people believe the line about a religion of peace because they want to, because we should all just get along and coexist in peace and harmony. That's just the humane way of life that we as Westerners are wired to like and want, but that's not what muslims have in mind. ---- Update: Quick! Someone call PG and get him to delete this thread so no one else will see what I'm saying here!
drcode 17y ago
> "perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites" Geee, I wonder why? Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any other major browser????
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  Eh, I don't buy that. I've got a client site that does fade-in/fade-out effects on multiple simultaneous elements, ajaxyness, and horizontally scrolled lists of images. It also uses jquery-like css selectors to target elements, and it intelligently re-renders (in realtime) selected page elements when the page is resized. I can do all of that in IE 6, 7, or 8, without maxing out a CPU core. What I can't do, and really would like to do, is offload more of the page rendering to Javascript, and the only reason I can't do that is because of the various noscript users out there.
old-gregg 17y ago
Regarding hardware-accelerated drawing of text: I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially a "game" running on top of DirectX, no? Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming you had a good card with good drivers. What am I missing? (I haven't done any Windows work in 5 years).
- drcode 17y ago
  The part of the post about the font rendering is BS anyway. The picture is supposed to show "sub-pixel positioning" and it only shows antialiasing (not even sub-pixel antialiasing) which as you've pointed out isn't handled by a browser anyway. "Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes up so it can position the next item- But the picture accompanying the post is wrong/irrelevant.
  - herf 17y ago
    Not sure I agree - most fonts are cached (as pixels) at a few offsets, so the ability to place a character is constrained by 1-pixel increments (or 1/3-pixel increments in the case of ClearType). A true vector placement of each character gives you the ability to show type at any subpixel offset and then anti-alias, and I think there's a good chance they're doing this. See this Loop/Blinn paper for more details: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblinn05.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblin...
- wmf 17y ago
  As I understand it, GDI+ does software rendering into a window buffer which then gets hardware-composited by DirectX. Direct2D now does hardware-accelerated rendering and compositing. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-direct2d-and-gdi.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-d...
akamaka 17y ago
Summary: still a long way to go. No announcement yet on @font-face, canvas, video. Basic performance improvements.
- halo 17y ago
  The @font-face spec doesn't mention a font standard, and Microsoft have already said they won't implement TTF or OTF because the font foundries don't like it. It's possible that IE will implement the upcoming WOFF (Web Open Font Format) standard in IE9 but I wouldn't rely on it.
  - akamaka 17y ago
    Sigh. Thanks a bunch for the info.
TallGuyShort 17y ago
This is nice - I don't think I've seen Microsoft look at themselves this candidly before. Next thing you know we'll have commercials saying "IE9? That was my idea!"
- cmelbye 17y ago
  It'll be people dressed up in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome costumes. "One day, I had the idea that browsers should follow web standards. And guess what? 10 years later Microsoft started following them! I'm an open source web rendering engine, and IE 9 was my idea."
mrshoe 17y ago
Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Control and influence. Backwards compatibility. And they probably still believe they can do it better.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    I'm not sure that they can't. Give Microsoft a compelling business reason to build a great browser that also supports IE 8,7, and 6 rendering modes, and I bet they'll do it.
    - dschobel 17y ago
      Isn't reclaiming the 20-30% market share they lost to Safari/Firefox/Chrome reason enough?
      - mcav 17y ago
        They're trying to support more standards -- by definition, they're just reinventing the work others have already done. So it's grunt work, only useful for their future influence and power. They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
        etherealG 17y ago
        I say let them worry about the cost/benefit ratio. If they can afford it, another engine with completely separate codebase is a good thing for the market. Just think how hard it would push webkit/mozilla/chrome if they did manage to beat them on speed. It would push them to get even better. Compeition is always good as long as 2 or more projects stay alive.
johns 17y ago
The most positive thing that came out of that keynote was that they focused on talking about achieving feature and performance parity with competing browsers, not adding useless features like Accelerators and Web Slices.
lmkg 17y ago
Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?
- dschobel 17y ago
  Nothing but time can kill IE6. Just wait another five years.
- zaatar 17y ago
  Nope. See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-ie6.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-...
- TravisLS 17y ago
  Very true. As happy as I am to see all the great feature support in IE9, it's going to be a long time before we can write CSS like this for any kind of mass audience.
ecoffey 17y ago
Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers and other OS bits and parts. No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).
- ironsam 17y ago
  But then they couldn't render with Direct2D and DirectWrite, which has potential to be a valuable improvement.
- statictype 17y ago
  Problem is, a lot of custom software depends on ActiveX controls and other plugins that work in IE but not anywhere else. Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have significant usage - at least within companies. Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one sponsored by Apple.
  - ecoffey 17y ago
    Right, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces, but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-) (indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would celebrate!
pkulak 17y ago
Border radius!
- billybob 17y ago
  Sweet Moses yes. Rounded corners should be a setting, not a project.
tlrobinson 17y ago
Canvas or GTFO.
acg 17y ago
32/100 is a little underwhelming. If it's a focus on standards then it's still dreadful. Am I missing something?
ttjervaag 17y ago
Rather condescending from Dean Hachamovitch I think. I blogged more about it here: http://thedailyt.com/2009/11/one-more-internet-explorer-to-worry-about/ http://thedailyt.com/2009/11/one-more-internet-explorer-to-w...
neelesh 17y ago
This is good. The end-users/web devs will benefit. We have more options, more competition and hopefully better browsers because of the competition.

88 points by johns 17y ago

The thing that shocked me the most was reading that Direct2D which can be used in place of GDI+. IMO, Microsoft should have made available a hardware-accelerated 2D library a LONG time ago ... before this, you had to use Direct3D to attain hardware acceleration, which was always far too much of a hassle just to render some 2D graphics.

drcode 17y ago

:( still no canvas or svg... jerks.

rbanffy 17y ago
At least it's almost as fast as the slowest competitor...
- drcode 17y ago
  Yeah, I love how they say IE is no longer an "outlier." They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I am shocked you would expect an honest report from Microsoft, about a very important product during the heavy media coverage of the PDC
  - mdemare 17y ago
    They did show how IE8 is orders of magnitude slower than its competitors - that display of honesty shocked me a little.
    - neilk 17y ago
      They admit the flaws when the next version is about to come out. Standard operating procedure for marketing.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        That's the only reason we have to imagine IE9 will be released soon. Had it been a "minor improvement" over IE8 and were it aimed squarely as a competitor to Chrome or Firefox, I would doubt it would ever launch. Just preventing companies from rewriting internal web apps to be more cross-browser-friendly would be sufficient accomplishment.
  - billybob 17y ago
    I'm looking for the trickery, and I haven't spotted it yet. Can you elaborate?
    - unfletch 17y ago
      I think he's speaking of y-axis' scale. Using such a large scale and including older versions of IE makes IE 9 look downright fast. If you plotted just the rightmost cluster (IE 9, FF 3.6, WebKit nightly) on its own graph with a scale that went from 0 to, say, 1500 instead of 16000, it would be very clear that IE 9 is still slow compared to it's peers -- nearly 3x slower than WebKit as noted by the earlier comment. It's quite an improvement, but here's hoping they keep optimizing.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Also, Firefox already gets snippy with Webkit because they bail on dealing with difficult corner cases (the page showing the HTML5 spec itself being a recent example), then trumpet how fast they are. Let's see how fast IE9 is when it actually supports the standards properly.
rufo 17y ago
No mention on if they actually, truly, really support transparent PNGs this time around, either. (If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent PNG....)
- etherealG 17y ago
  that's a bug in their implementation of opacity, not of png. they don't support existing alpha in their opacity calculations.
  - rufo 17y ago
    Whoops, you're right. I hadn't really read in-depth when I ran into this several months ago, and I was rather peeved at the time regardless. It doesn't really matter though - the point is, they still have a long way to go before they can earn back the trust they've squandered amongst the web development community.

bugs 17y ago

I wonder when or even if the attitude seen in the comments will spread out to the rest of the computer community. (IE is the devil)

dschobel 17y ago

Maybe I'm just an optimist but I'm really glad to see that MS is even looking at the Acid3 and SunSpider tests as important metrics.

notauser 17y ago
If only we weren't going to have to live with IE6 until 2020. Then we might be able to use more of the new stuff. (Apologies for bitterness, I spent a lot of today back porting a Very Large Web App to IE6.)
billybob 17y ago
Me too. Not that they have much choice. Even the non-geeks in my office have noticed that they can work faster with Firefox. As more things move to the web, built on web standards, they can't afford to continue having the worst browser by far.
- cracell 17y ago
  To be far. IE8 is vastly better then IE7 and IE6 but Microsoft is not aggressive about getting it's users to upgrade. Whereas Firefox, Safari and especially Chrome are.
mpk 17y ago
Microsoft's efforts towards (de facto or de jure) standards compliance are dismal. I've been working on a client-side app since before IE7 came out. The much hyped IE7 release gave us some performance benefits, but apart from that it just added another IE release that had to be tested and tested. IE8 made things even worse. We now have scenarios that work fine in all recent (going back 1 to 3 major versions, you know, everything over the last few years) of Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but IE? Hahaha, you must be joking. It works in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7. Or just in IE8, or in IE6 and IE8, but not IE7... And now they're threatening to unleash yet another IE version. Why couldn't they just stick with IE8 for the time being and fix things there? (And don't tell me 'the version number is just marketing', we all know that major releases entail lots and lots of changes and 'fixing things we messed up before').

anigbrowl 17y ago

I see a (brief) mention of HTML5 compliance; I'm not sure if it's significant that Chrome beta fails many of the tests at http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5.htm http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5.htm

pierrefar 17y ago

I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.

shiranaihito 17y ago
I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.
- billybob 17y ago
  Give it time.
- shiranaihito 17y ago
  Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon. OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit? I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe). See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk about anything that really matters in the world.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    Saying "lololol M$ i hope they die" is frowned upon. Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it. Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major products and access to give feedback to people who care. Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil', just the inertia of a huge company). You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
    - shiranaihito 17y ago
      Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it. Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to tell me why they're all invalid? I've done this kind of thing before, and every time someone disparages MS here, he's treading on thin ice. There will always be MS-apologists around. Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years They sure have made a show of being more "open" to please/distract programmers, that's all. You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter. I realize this is something that people don't want to hear, and can't process without adjusting their conceptions of things, but that doesn't make it any less true. Want some content? Here's a video of angry muslims in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20. One of the signs they're proudly displaying says "Europe, you will pay. Your annihilation is on its way!!!". Does that sound a tad threatening to you? That protest is probably related to events in 2004, when they actually killed a Dutch film director, Theo Van Gogh, for releasing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 .. Yes, they killed a man for making a short movie. The average muslim you meet will most likely tell you that Islam is a "religion of peace", but what they don't mention is that if you say otherwise, they'll kill you. If it's such a mellow religion, why is there a protest full of its followers waving signs saying that they'll destroy Europe then? Western people believe the line about a religion of peace because they want to, because we should all just get along and coexist in peace and harmony. That's just the humane way of life that we as Westerners are wired to like and want, but that's not what muslims have in mind. ---- Update: Quick! Someone call PG and get him to delete this thread so no one else will see what I'm saying here!

drcode 17y ago

> "perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites" Geee, I wonder why? Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any other major browser????

thaumaturgy 17y ago
Eh, I don't buy that. I've got a client site that does fade-in/fade-out effects on multiple simultaneous elements, ajaxyness, and horizontally scrolled lists of images. It also uses jquery-like css selectors to target elements, and it intelligently re-renders (in realtime) selected page elements when the page is resized. I can do all of that in IE 6, 7, or 8, without maxing out a CPU core. What I can't do, and really would like to do, is offload more of the page rendering to Javascript, and the only reason I can't do that is because of the various noscript users out there.

old-gregg 17y ago

Regarding hardware-accelerated drawing of text: I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially a "game" running on top of DirectX, no? Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming you had a good card with good drivers. What am I missing? (I haven't done any Windows work in 5 years).

drcode 17y ago
The part of the post about the font rendering is BS anyway. The picture is supposed to show "sub-pixel positioning" and it only shows antialiasing (not even sub-pixel antialiasing) which as you've pointed out isn't handled by a browser anyway. "Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes up so it can position the next item- But the picture accompanying the post is wrong/irrelevant.
- herf 17y ago
  Not sure I agree - most fonts are cached (as pixels) at a few offsets, so the ability to place a character is constrained by 1-pixel increments (or 1/3-pixel increments in the case of ClearType). A true vector placement of each character gives you the ability to show type at any subpixel offset and then anti-alias, and I think there's a good chance they're doing this. See this Loop/Blinn paper for more details: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblinn05.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblin...
wmf 17y ago
As I understand it, GDI+ does software rendering into a window buffer which then gets hardware-composited by DirectX. Direct2D now does hardware-accelerated rendering and compositing. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-direct2d-and-gdi.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-d...

akamaka 17y ago

Summary: still a long way to go. No announcement yet on @font-face, canvas, video. Basic performance improvements.

halo 17y ago
The @font-face spec doesn't mention a font standard, and Microsoft have already said they won't implement TTF or OTF because the font foundries don't like it. It's possible that IE will implement the upcoming WOFF (Web Open Font Format) standard in IE9 but I wouldn't rely on it.
- akamaka 17y ago
  Sigh. Thanks a bunch for the info.

TallGuyShort 17y ago

This is nice - I don't think I've seen Microsoft look at themselves this candidly before. Next thing you know we'll have commercials saying "IE9? That was my idea!"

cmelbye 17y ago
It'll be people dressed up in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome costumes. "One day, I had the idea that browsers should follow web standards. And guess what? 10 years later Microsoft started following them! I'm an open source web rendering engine, and IE 9 was my idea."

mrshoe 17y ago

Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?

chaosmachine 17y ago
Control and influence. Backwards compatibility. And they probably still believe they can do it better.
- jmtulloss 17y ago
  I'm not sure that they can't. Give Microsoft a compelling business reason to build a great browser that also supports IE 8,7, and 6 rendering modes, and I bet they'll do it.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    Isn't reclaiming the 20-30% market share they lost to Safari/Firefox/Chrome reason enough?
    - mcav 17y ago
      They're trying to support more standards -- by definition, they're just reinventing the work others have already done. So it's grunt work, only useful for their future influence and power. They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
      - etherealG 17y ago
        I say let them worry about the cost/benefit ratio. If they can afford it, another engine with completely separate codebase is a good thing for the market. Just think how hard it would push webkit/mozilla/chrome if they did manage to beat them on speed. It would push them to get even better. Compeition is always good as long as 2 or more projects stay alive.

johns 17y ago

The most positive thing that came out of that keynote was that they focused on talking about achieving feature and performance parity with competing browsers, not adding useless features like Accelerators and Web Slices.

lmkg 17y ago

Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?

dschobel 17y ago
Nothing but time can kill IE6. Just wait another five years.
zaatar 17y ago
Nope. See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-ie6.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-...
TravisLS 17y ago
Very true. As happy as I am to see all the great feature support in IE9, it's going to be a long time before we can write CSS like this for any kind of mass audience.

ecoffey 17y ago

Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers and other OS bits and parts. No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).

ironsam 17y ago
But then they couldn't render with Direct2D and DirectWrite, which has potential to be a valuable improvement.
statictype 17y ago
Problem is, a lot of custom software depends on ActiveX controls and other plugins that work in IE but not anywhere else. Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have significant usage - at least within companies. Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one sponsored by Apple.
- ecoffey 17y ago
  Right, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces, but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-) (indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would celebrate!

pkulak 17y ago

Border radius!

billybob 17y ago
Sweet Moses yes. Rounded corners should be a setting, not a project.

tlrobinson 17y ago

Canvas or GTFO.

acg 17y ago

32/100 is a little underwhelming. If it's a focus on standards then it's still dreadful. Am I missing something?

ttjervaag 17y ago

Rather condescending from Dean Hachamovitch I think. I blogged more about it here: http://thedailyt.com/2009/11/one-more-internet-explorer-to-worry-about/ http://thedailyt.com/2009/11/one-more-internet-explorer-to-w...

neelesh 17y ago

This is good. The end-users/web devs will benefit. We have more options, more competition and hopefully better browsers because of the competition.