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IE9 Public Beta now open and it's crazy fast!
Dark Shroud
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So the public beta is now up for anyone to download. Give it a shoot this thing is very fast.
http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9
Add-ons:
Ad Blocker: http://simple-adblock.com/
Here are informative reviews:
http://www.winsupersite.com/live/ie9_beta.asp
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/internet-explorer-9-beta-review-microsoft-reinvents-the-browser
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars
Some helpful articles: (more will be added as found/released)
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/ie9-power-tips-the-secrets-of-pinned-site-shortcuts/2475
http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9
Add-ons:
Ad Blocker: http://simple-adblock.com/
Here are informative reviews:
http://www.winsupersite.com/live/ie9_beta.asp
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/internet-explorer-9-beta-review-microsoft-reinvents-the-browser
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars
Some helpful articles: (more will be added as found/released)
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/ie9-power-tips-the-secrets-of-pinned-site-shortcuts/2475
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didnt 8 just like comeout not to long ago or have i drastically lost track of time?
For comparison, Chrome v1 was released in December '08 and they are now on v6.
Interesting UI choices in IE9, i'm pretty disappointed in a few things.
Namely this:
Internet options needs a total overhaul, it's a sad joke. I don't think MS have changed this (the basic layout) since something like IE4. It really needs fixing, it's a jungle of options.
Add ons is still a joke too.
I can see why they chose to stick the tabs on the right (cleaner ui), but the moment you have more than a handful it becomes unmanageable. I think Mozilla (and Opera) are really the only ones trying new things to try to make it more manageable.
I've never been fond of having the search function integrated into the url bar because I like to be able to select my search engine with the press of a mouse click, kinda neat that they thought to put the search engine icon at the bottom so you can quickly switch between results. I'd kind of like to see that done in other browsers.
Nice to see an improvement on the HTML5Test.com site, but it's still light years behind everyone else.
It's also nice that IE9 doesn't freeze up when you resize the window with the FishIE test with 1000 fish. (Cough, cough)
It's kind of unsurprising that IE9 slightly outperforms Fx4 on the Direct2D stuff, MS can pretty much query the guys who created Direct2D to get optimal performance.
The current Fx4 nightly beats this on sunspider by about 50ms on my pc whilst the latest Fx4 beta is beaten by about 20ms by the IE9 beta. I've not tested IE9 on Kraken yet though.
I am kind of disappointed that MS is harking on about HTML5 so much and yet it is getting bitch slapped by all of the other browsers, even mobile browsers for crying out loud..
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
But at least they're trying this time around, even if it was in response to Mozilla and co. bitch slapping IE around.
I can't take anyone says stuff like this seriously. IE6 is just about 10 years old at this point and there were almost no standards around back then. If you're able to remember to battle between IE & Netscape that was more than just what browser you're using. Not to mention that when IE6 came out it was actually good. I've been using IE since v3.
"Bitch slapping" really when IE still has over three times the market share of Firefox. If anything it's Chrome that's the big competitor now.
Yes, bitchslapping. IE had practical monopoly on the Windows browser market, and which got whittled away by Microsoft's complacency to about 60% nowadays, a figure that is still dropping. A majority share, sure, but if your ass got knocked out by 30+ percent by a bunch of upstart browsers, then yeah, I consider that to be fucking significant. This is the sort of thing which finally woke them up and fastracked IE back into development with 7, which was still ass but leagues better than 6.
Chrome wasn't even around when Firefox started chewing off IE's dominance, and it's still like a third of Mozilla's share, but still respectable and fast-growing. Fine enough, it's a great browser.
Point is, they made a deficient browser, and when it's time to support and grow it in the evolving web ecosystem, Microsoft dropped the ball. They've since shook off that monopolistic complacency, which is a good thing (and 9 honestly does look intriguing to me), but don't tell me they didn't royally screwed the pooch back in the day.
edit: i'm actually installing this biznitch right now, so let's see how it plays
Yeah and if you wanted all the visitors be able to view the sites with the correct layout you had put in extra develop time for the crummy IE piece of shit. (For example, back then, I had several cases where a css layout worked fine for Firefox and Opera, Safari other Webkit browsers and in IE it was falling appart). Not to mention that there are still sad, sad people who use IE 6 still today. Its like cancer on the web.
Also, this is Microsofts idea of tab management:
On the javascript tests, there is an obvious bias for certain tests for certain browsers. Google even acknowledges this by naming their test v8bench (their js engine named v8).
Mozilla has just released their js test suite named Kraken, I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more to be more impartial in this regard. Their mission has always been to make the web better and not to dominate it.
Also, HTML5Test is essentially all the stuff that web developers want. It's a simple impartial test to see what a web browser supports that's part of the forming HTML5 spec. Things like web workers, canvas, storage, webgl etc.
I find it pretty miserable that IE9 fares so badly on that, especially in comparison to browsers that have been released for a while now (Firefox 3.6) or mobile web browsers (like Safari on the iphone/itouch).
You may think i'm being a bit cruel on MS here, but think about it. How much money and resources does MS have? And this is still the best they can do. I suspect there's some internal struggle going on between divisions about features they should support. There was a news article a bit ago that at MS there's a fight going on between silverlight and IE HTML5 people about features to support so it doesn't eat into silverlights share.
EDIT:
From a quick Google search.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Allow me an overly simplified answer. In Win7 IE can be removed/disabled. But IE has a "scripting engine" that is part of the OS that many software developers use.
Also Silverlight isn't going anywhere. It can easily exist in an HTML5 world. MS just needs to roll out a 64bit version already. I believe Windows has a 64bit version of flash now.
Sorry, I just have to clarify this. HTML 4.0 was recommended as a standard by the W3C in December of 1997, CSS 2 was recommended as a standard in May of 1998 (and CSS1 in December 1996.)
IE6 was released in August 2001, only 2 and a half years after IE 5 was released in March 1999. I can see IE5 not being standards compliant, but considering they probably started working on IE6 *after* the release of IE5 at some point, its a pretty large time frame from when the standards were 'final' to the release of IE6.
The standards existed, Microsoft chose to ignore the fuck out of them.
Also why are we talking about IE6 anyway, its an old dead horse, and it should stay dead forever. The only thing i'm really disappointed with over IE9 is that they are refusing to make it work on windows XP. Windows XP still has a huge market share of the computers out there - by not supporting XP microsoft stands to lose ground when the web starts using more and more html5.
Also html5 specification isnt out yet, which means any tests developed for the specification can not be trusted at all because they are based on an unfinished standard. There is a public working draft but there are plenty of things that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Hopefully it will all get fleshed out and a html5 standard formally approved by w3c.
When the specification is done by the end of this year (hopefully) then I would start believing 'tests' working off that specification. And hopefully Microsoft with their seemingly focus on some standards compliancy will ahere to the standard agreed upon by w3.
As for the IE debate and Firefox bitchslapping them. Didnt they not break 10% market share until a few years ago? Hardly eating away at IE. I am not an IE fan by any means but to state that any of the OS products have had impacts on Microsoft Market share until recently is just absurd. Netscape was the closest thing back in those days and I would just have preferred them to go away at that time as programming for two different systems sucked bad back then. And call me insane I preferred programming for IE.
We're talking about IE6 because we *wish* it was an old dead horse. The fucking thing has been very very slowly dying, but it isn't dead yet and it's the bane of web developers almost everywhere.
At any rate, they aren't 'refusing to make it work on XP', it *won't* work on XP. I believe it's because of the graphics acceleration which must use the new desktop capabilities introduced in Vista. I'm assuming that the graphics acceleration is so integral to the browser's performance that they can't just 'cut it out for XP'.
I wouldn't worry about the HTML5 spec not being 'final' yet, it's in a solid enough state at this point. CSS3 isn't final either, but that hasn't stopped browser makers from implementing various features.
EDIT: Also, why is it so hard for everyone but Mozilla to do a decent bookmark/favourites system? Firefox's bookmark system is fricking awesome, why don't the others just lift it. I'm surprised Google hasn't just used the code for it, chunks of Chrome are from not only webkit but from Firefox too.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Doing it any other way I imagine involves completely writing your own implementation of graphics acceleration, which wouldn't be as nearly tied into how the XP (and older) desktop works.
But people who think IE6 is dead haven't done any web development. We did a web project earlier this year where the first pass did not have specific tweaks and fixes in-place for IE6 (specifically a lot of the CSS hacks that are required to do full CSS layouts in IE6); It was a disaster. The customer had people screaming they couldn't use the app because they were still on IE6. This is in 2010. We had to go back and put in an IE6 compliant layout.
And really, the sooner both XP and IE6 die, the better.
Quite frankly, you are *not* getting a site that appears virtually the same in standards browsers *and* IE6, fuck you. It's annoying enough to get a site appearing virtually the same in standards browsers and IE7.
If you insist on using a nearly 10 year old browser in 2010, all I intend to make sure is that you are able to get the same *content* in an accessible manner, that's it.
That said, I do have a sub-site right now that doesn't degrade correctly in IE6, because even though the columned CSS layout I'm using *does* work well in IE6, the modifications I had to make to it apparently broke the backwards compatibility. I'm not terribly worried about it at the moment however as the entire website is getting a complete overhaul fairly soon anyway.
The IE6 version of our project is about 75% feature complete compared to the "modern standards" version, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it, because IE6 is so fucking broken. We had to make work what we could make work and deal with the rest.
Since we're just a print company and not a dedicated online only type place we don't really have to focus as much on backwards compatibility with older browsers.
In other words, fuck IE6.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Their brief was basically: Take this old desktop app built with Delphi 6 for Win2K, that hasn't had more than cursory maintenance in three years and whose original developer left the company before that, taking whatever notes he may have made with him, and turn it into a full-featured web(-only) app.
Somehow, they manage to get a sellable framework together in about two years which, considering they were essentially starting from scratch and didn't have an interface guy, was near-miraculous.
Then after another year of fixes, several poorly conceived and largely undefined feature additions (dropped from a great height of course), and finally hiring a beta-tester (singular, part time), they (all six of them) had to explain to the crazy boss why their big government contract (negotiated entirely over their heads) was taking so long to implement, and why couldn't they just make it work in IE6?
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
/me leaves
Yeah, the missmanagement of IT projects / small sized enterprises is often outstanding. There are no documentations, or insufficient documentation, no backup of important files. Except ones which are out of date or are residing on the "live server". The project(s) are mostly maintained and supervised by one guy (most likley "Bob" which is required to put these together on a non-busy day, or in his break time) - and if he leaves / dies / quits / is fired there is no easy way to maintain or continue develop the project he/she worked on.
My situation nearly 5 years ago was that I was a trainee (in Germany you are required to work for a certain timespan to get a official certificate in a job - which is a good excuse for enterprises to pay you next to nothing and add tasks to your shedule you are not supposed to do. [sarcasm] Because, yeah, you are the "IT-guy" this means besides maintaining the machines, you are able to write complex custom IT and web-applications - for any field and platform of course. [/sarcasm]). So it was my task to "polish" the fucked-up small coperate website. Basically I had to tear it down completely (argh, hideous 1996ara animated gifs and background music), extract the "shop portion", rescue the database and build a new site from scratch and import the data. Of course, it should "stand out". - So I wasn't allowed just to use the default look of a current GNU php content management system - nooo - I had add to add a custom design too. And boy had I fun with IE6 and its horrible broken standards and display modes.
I still have nightmares about Internet Explorer 6 trying to show me something, but it is all warped and messed up and about a Fox on fire trying to fetch data but returning with an empty site.
Having worked in cutomer support, I know that there are _still_ lots of people running unpatched Windows XP. At least in Vista and Win updates are enabled by default and the system is usually pretty unobstrusive about updating the OS and browser - dunno if it silently updates the browser version, though.
are you on XP?
did you get the service pack from windows update or did you download the installer and install it that way/make a slipstreamed install disk?
I had issues on XP with IE8 not installing right because I downloaded SP2 to make a slipstream and there was some bug with that variant but not the windows update variant.
Might be similar here?
Well my helpful usefulness is at a end, then
I like most of IE9, I'm not liking the new UI so much. IE8 had the best tab controls of any browser when it was released and now they took a step backwards.
My pre-requisites for bumping out Chrome from its throne:
+ Must be safe. I practice safe browsing but still, I'd rather not have it hi-jacked with toolbars and shit like previous IEs, which I think is a non-issue this time around.
+ The UI must be nice to see in action. I really like how the tabs can be torn and placed around with Chrome and I love how it is essentially 3 bars. The top bar w/ tabs and the minimize, window, and close button; the address bar, and then bookmarks. I am intrigued with the taskbar features though!
+ Also, it must not be totally broken. If pages just simply do not render right, then what is the point? And I am not talking about super cutting edge pretentious HTML5 bullshit. If photobucket suddenly isn't accepting uploads, or if google is broken, then it needs time to polish out.