An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

Article
11/18/2009

We’re just about a month after the Windows 7 launch, and wanted to show an early look at some of the work underway on Internet Explorer 9.

At the PDC today, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable standards, we showed how IE and Windows will make the power of PC hardware available to web developers in the browser. Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today. Web site developers will see performance gains and other benefits without having to re-write their sites.

Performance Progress. Browser performance involves many different sub-systems within the browser. Different sites – and different activities within the same site – place different loads and demands on the browser.

For example, two news sites might look similar to a user but have very different performance characteristics. Because of how the developers authored the sites, one site might spend most of its time in the Javascript engine and DOM, while the other site might spend most of its time in layout and rendering. A site that’s more of an “application” than a page (like web-based email, or the Office Web Apps) can exercise browser subsystems in completely different ways depending on the user’s actions.

The chart below shows how much time different sites spends in different subsystems of IE. For example, it shows that one major news site spends most of its time in the script engine and marshalling, while another spends most of its time in script and rendering, and the Excel Web App spends very little of its time running script at all.

chart of which IE subsystems different websites spend their time in. The chart shows that each site has a very different allocation of which subsystems they spend time in.

Note that this chart shows the percentages of total time spent in each subsystem, not relative time between sites. It focuses on just the primary browsing sub-systems and doesn’t include “frame” functionality (like anti-phishing), or third-party software that’s running in the IE process (like toolbars, or controls like Flash). It also factors out networking since that’s dependent on the users network speed. Notice also that a site’s profile can change significantly across scenarios; for example, the Excel Web App profile for loading a file is quite different from the profile for selecting part of the sheet.

The script engine is just one of these browser subsystems. There are many benchmarks for script performance. One common test of script performance is from Apple’s Webkit team, the SunSpider test. The chart below shows the relative performance of different browsers on the same machine running the SunSpider test.

chart of IE, FF, Chrome and Safari performance of Sunspider test. The IE9 results on sunspider are competitve with FF 3.6, Chrome4 and the nightly webkit build.

In addition to IE7 and the current “final release” versions of major browsers, we’ve included the latest pre-release “under development” builds of the major browsers. We’re just about a month after IE8 was released as part of the Windows 7 launch, and the version of IE under development is no longer an outlier.

It is worth noting that once the differences are this small, the other subsystems that contribute to performance become much more important, and perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites. That said, we remain committed to improving script performance.

We’re looking at the performance characteristics of all the browser sub-systems as real-world sites use them. Our goal is to deliver better performance across the board for real-world sites, not just benchmarks.

Standards Progress. Our focus is providing rich capabilities – the ones that most developers want to use – in an interoperable way. Developers want more capabilities in the browser to build great apps and experiences; they want them to work in an interoperable way so they don’t have to re-write and re-test their sites again and again. The standards process offers a good means to that end.

As engineers, when we want to assess progress, we develop a test suite that exercises the breadth and depth of functionality. With IE8, we delivered a highly-interoperable implementation of CSS 2.1 and contributed over 7,200 tests to the W3C. Standards that do not include validation tests are much more difficult to implement consistently, and more difficult for site developers to rely on.

Some standards tests – like Acid3 – have become widely used as shorthand for standards compliance, even with some shortcomings. Acid3 tests about 100 aspects of different technologies (many still in the “working draft” stage of standardization), including many edge cases and error conditions. Here’s the latest build of IE9 running Acid3:

screen shot of ACID3 test showing a score of 32.

As we improve support in IE for technologies that site developers use, the score will continue to go up. A more meaningful (from the point of view of web developers) example of standards support involves rounded corners. Here’s IE9 drawing rounded corners, along with the underlying mark-up:

screenshot of a box with rounded corners. each corner is rounded differently.

Another example of standards support that matters to web developers is CSS3 selectors. Here’s a test page that some people in the web development community put together at css3.info; it’s a good illustration of a more thorough test, and one that shows some of the progress we’ve made since releasing IE8:

screenshot of css3.info test page showing many passing test cases.

Community testing efforts like this one can be helpful. Ultimately, we want to work with the community and W3C and other members of the working groups to define true validation test suites, like the one that we’re all working on together for CSS 2.1, for the standards that matter to developers. For example, this link tests one of the HTML5 storage APIs; some browsers (including IE8) support it today, while others don’t.

The work we do here, both in the product and on test suites, is a means to an end: a rich interoperable platform that developers can rely on.

Bringing the power of PC hardware and Windows to web developers in the browser. The PC platform and ecosystem around Windows deliver amazing hardware innovation. The browser should be a place where the benefits of that hardware innovation shine through for web developers.

We’re changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers. The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU. (This interview includes screen captures of a few examples.) Now, web developers can take advantage of the hardware ecosystem’s advances in graphics while they continue to author sites with the same interoperable standards patterns they’re used to.

In addition to better performance, this technology shift also increases font quality and readability with sub-pixel positioning:

96 point Gabriola on a Lenovo X61 ThinkPad at 100% Zoom using GDI (note jaggies):

96 point Gabriola on a Lenovo X61 ThinkPad at 100% Zoom: Direct2D (without jaggies):

Last week, Channel 9 interviewed several of the engineers on the team. You can find videos of the interviews here:

Introduction, and Interoperable Standards

Early look at the Script Engine

Hardware accelerated graphics and text in the browser via Direct2D

While we’re still early in the product cycle, we wanted to be clear to developers about our approach and the progress so far. We’re applying the feedback from the IE8 product cycle, and we’re committed to delivering on another version of IE.

Thanks,
Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

Update 11/23/09 - The IE9 demo from PDC is now available. The IE content starts around minute 48.

Comments

Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hey that was a really nice post... I work in a <a href="http://www.brandmantra.net/">website designing</a> company and appreciate it a lot...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Pleaaaaaaaaase, in the name of the WORLD, give up developing IE once and for all!!!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
ALL WE WANT IS WEB STANDARDS SUPPORT. THAT IS ALL; TAKE YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR REARS AND JUST GIVE US THAT.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
and no mention of xhmtl (i.e. html served as xml, not tag soup) either - xhtml 1.0 has been about for a decade, xhtml 1.1 for years and html 5 will support xml serialisation too. Finally on ie, too? PLEASE?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
There must be a fool in MSFT who just doesn't get it. Standards compliance, you idiot.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The next version of IE9 can render JavaScript faster than Google OS or Safari. JScript is the name of IE9's JavaScript engine, in IE9 it is compatible with ECMAScript. IE9 compiled at 2009-11-23 has a higher score on the SunSpider test than Chrome 3 or Safari 4.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I am really looking forwrad to see ie9.! Nice.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This website uses vector technology VML and HTML + TIME sous IE6-7-8-9 demo : http://www.cyberhalcom blog infos : http://nitroblog.mediasites.fr
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I would like to know, for real, why Microsoft feels the need to continue development of Internet Explorer. Can't you just let those who are good at it be good at it, and you try to be good at something else? I am a web developer, and I will agree with every other web developer out there (who is serious about good development) that IE only causes headaches. If it didn't exist, our jobs would be a lot easier and more enjoyable. Please, if anyone has "real" information as to why Microsoft has to keep putting out IE, I would love to know. The only people I know who use IE and like it are only too ignorant to know better. I have yet to meet a person that I've tried to convert to Firefox or Safari who hasn't been thankful and gladly made the switch for good once informed.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
And Godwin's Law is proven yet again!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Firstly, I hope that the 32/100 score is going to improve. From a web developers point of view, standards ARE everyone, and if you want to stop developers categorising browsers into "Internet Explorer" and "Proper browsers", you need to pay attention to that. Secondly, PLEASE add SVG support to IE. By ignoring SVG you're holding back the whole web - unilateral SVG support could change the face of web design, and IE is the only missing link!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Congrats! You'll still be behind the other browsers when you release. Working on the IE team has to be punishment for naughty developers @ microsoft.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Double posted, sorry (stupid 'submit' button didn't work for about 10 clicks in Maxthon 3).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Now that we know IE9 is getting more advanced than other browsers (for now) when will we see IE9 in beta? (Because I'm a beta/alpha tester and would be more than happy to use beta/alpha/pre-alpha software for everyday tasks.)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Maybe IE9 will finally support transparent PNGs?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm impressed, can't wait for what else is coming in IE 9!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
really lookin forwrad to see ie9.!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I don't understand why you don't just adopt the webkit rendering engine and call it a day. seriously, it's open source, and it runs circles around IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
color me impressed! Rounded corners in IE. Its obviously a long way off (esp. considering that the slow pace of improving IE has caused many users and organizations to stay with IE6 and IE7) but I can't wait for IE9 to arrive! No mention of Canvas or SVG yet... any comment? ;-)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Maybe IE9 will finally support transparent PNGs?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Now that we know IE9 is getting more advanced than other browsers (for now) when will we see IE9 in beta? (Because I'm a beta/alpha tester and would be more than happy to use beta/alpha/pre-alpha software for everyday tasks.)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
IE7+ supports transparent PNG's
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Releasing IE9 will simply mean I have one more version of IE to check my sites in, increasing my workload with another 10-15% and adding another conditional statement and ie-only stylesheet to my markup. Sad, but true.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please stop developing Internet Explorer in favor of better browsers like Firefox and Chrome. It's been so hard designing for IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"Acid3 tests about 100 aspects of different technologies (many still in the “working draft” stage of standardization)" I believe the above statement is false. Can you cite examples? From the author of the Acid3 test: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1200301306&count=1 Criteria include: "The behaviour expected by the test must be justifiable using only standards that were in the Candidate Recommendation stage or better in 2004."
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Really?? This is it?? At least you're honest that IE9 just barely compares to even modern-day browsers. By the time IE9 is released, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox will all be two versions ahead of where they are now, probably!! Pathetic.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
IE9 is the beginning of the end of Firefox and Google Chrome.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Be nice guys - I for one am glad to see they're trying. And it is an early look, mmkay?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Can't wait for IE9. I'm using 8 and must say i'm very satisfied.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
what about the new HTML5 tags - audio, video, and canvas? And what about geolocation, accelerometer, web workers and SVG?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Derek: Lol. That's funny. We'll see won't we.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
So, thanks for the opportunity to comment on the development of this "wonderful" browser. Now, where should I send the invoice for the hours spent dealing and debugging this "wonderful" browser over the past years???? I'm sure you have money to compensate the frustration of thousands of web designer and developers around the world. PLEASE GIVE US ALL A FAVOR. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
semoga jauh lebih baik dari versi versi sebelumnya...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
how about fixing IE8 first? senks!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What's the status on some of the more "popular" HTML5 tags like <video> and <audio>? Will IE9 support these tags, and with what codecs?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Adopt webkit. Save Microsoft, the world, and the future from any further frustrations and cost.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Will it run on XP? Please say so!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Great direction... but how about hardware accelerated Canvas?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
To questions: 1: Will it support XP, or is it Vista only? 2: Can it be installed along side an existing IE6 to allow corporations with internal "IE6 only" web application a better forward migration path? If you combine this with an ie plugin similary to "IE tab for firefox" which could allow IE9 to open an tab containing an embedded IE6 it would really solve a lot of problems.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Jeff, sure. None of the CSS3 features used by the test page itself were CR at the time the test was released (CSS3 Selectors and CSS3 Color to name obvious ones). As rendering the test page properly is explicitly required to pass - i.e. scoring 100/100 is necessary but not sufficient - I believe this statement to be in fact correct on these grounds alone. Moreover, a number of ACID3 tests exercise some of these same features through script; tests 48 to 59, for instance, also run a number of CSS3 Selectors, a module which is moving towards CR only now. (ACID3 was released in March 2008). Do note that the post you link to predates the release of ACID3. Our statement only intends to reflect what the code actually does.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
So, will the new IE9 will support the current HTML5 tags already supported by the other browers (canvas, video...) ? Thanks !
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@bort: As mentioned in this post, CSS3 selectors support is already significantly improved, and the improvement in ACID3, rounded corners, etc, all demonstrate early progress against standards. The key point about DirectWrite and Direct2D is that they improve the user-experience on all sites, not just those that are updated in support of new standards. These improvements will also be important to providing a great experience on standards-based sites. @behindthetimes: I ~think~ you're actually complaining about the proprietary IE "filters" legacy feature. Filters don't work well with transparent PNGs, ClearType text, etc. This isn't related to PNG support, but rather one of the many limitations of use of non-standard filters.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
1st graph is too difficult to distinguish
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
any chance of somebody addressing the status of everything mentioned here: http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/ would be fantastic to have a definitive list many regards, nathan
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I reckon... on the quiet go for a push towards acid3, aim to do at least 51%. It would do a great deal psychologically for everyone (us and you) if you could hit more than half these tests.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Seriously please use Webkit!! that would save us time developing the websites. Why can't you update IE regular, for example IE 8.1, IE 8.2, IE 8.3, IE 8.4 and so on.. just like what Chrome, Firefox, Opera is doing? no wonder they are so above when it come to web standard and great CSS support.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What's the point of developing IE9? By the time it'll be released it will just be behind the other browsers yet again. I suggest saving the manpower and time and just adopt and use Webkit. I don't want to have to worry about 4 separate IE versions, if you guys were serious about this then IE8 should've been what IE9 is going to be, same with the prior versions.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Sylvain, thanks - I'll take that up with Ian so that I can correct my own understanding of Acid3.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@Sylvain: CSS 3 Selectors had a CR published in 2001, what Acid3 tests is based upon statements in that (and that are also true in later WDs). CSS 3 Color was in a similar state. So yes, although some of the specifications tested had returned to WD, they had been in CR by 2004. I presume the JS engine is new and has JIT, as it is unlikely to be that quick without. Is it the same as the ES5 implementation that has been mentioned on es-discuss? What about bucket 6 of Acid3 (which tests ECMAScript support)? So, what we can tell from Acid3 is that you fail almost all of bucket 1 (DOM Traversal, DOM Range, HTTP), almost all of bucket 2 (DOM2 Core and DOM2 Events), and almost all of bucket 5 (the Acid3 competition, mainly SVG and web fonts), and do all right everywhere else… What about bucket 3, which mainly tests CSS 3 selectors (albeit in a lot of edge cases)? I presume that is intended to be fixed as much as possible? It is, however, nice to see the IE starting work in earnest on CSS 3 support (above and beyond what is already supported, the majority of which are things based upon formerly proprietary IE behaviour).
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm glad to see the rendering improvements and CSS support... But seriously, HTML5 NEEDS to be well-supported. IE will have no future it doesn't get on standards now.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
How many more version are going to be released before IE6 is retired? I applaud the work which you are doing to help the web progress, but whilst your older browsers (especially IE6) are still supported, the effort is in vain.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
umm ok so this browser is going to be only like 3 years behind webkit.. nice.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Why is everyone complaining? Seriously, I don't mind the fact IE doesn't use WebKit but I am just curious of where Trident will go. IE is great because of it's past. It was the most standards compliant browser around until IE6 came (let us not speak of it again). Sure, IE is behind it's rivals but seeing that Microsoft are trying to make an effort is good enough for me. You can go on complaining if you want, but I think it's just pointless. Carry on, I won't mind...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@GM,saurabh: Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-ie6.aspx for discussion of IE6 and its support lifespan.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
As an engineer, I'd say stop trying to show us new things that we don't want, like what is an "Excel Web App" anyhow? And why would we care? IE is not the market leader anymore so we have no use for proprietary technology. Same goes with The MS Office 2010 Team, they are doing the same thing with HTML support in emails. IE9 will be the nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer, and good riddance.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
EricLaw - I think the thing that irritates most of us is that a team of developers (you guys) are telling us (millions of professional designers and web developers) what constitutes "best practices" for User Experience. The fact is, the field is called User Experience DESIGN for a reason. Provide us (designers and web developers) with compliant, working tools, and let US worry about the user experience. You should not be dictating to us on this matter, especially when there are other development teams out there who are responsive to our needs, and provide platform-independent standards compliance without workarounds. I don't mean to take this out solely on you - I realize you work as part of a team, and many decisions are out of your hands, but collectively, Internet Explorer is despised by everyone who has ever had to go back and neuter their code because you ignore US by refusing to provide the baselined standards.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Graphics acceleration isn't available on other browserse YET! Don't act like IE9 will be the only one if it truly will be. And showing us IE9 still sits at 38/100, even when you say it will get better, should be embarrassing to you when you consider every other browser is pushing up against 100 right now, if they aren't at 100. I read in this post a lot of PR talk and little substance. We heard all this when IE7 came out. Then IE8. And IE9 will still be far, far behind every other browser when it ever comes out. IE continues to lose market share and, more importantly, developer interest.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Hmmm, concerning canvas "Hardware accelerated graphics". Are they talking about the fonts part or is there more? I mean, if they are using DirectX for drawing it surely won't be too hard to support some canvas-like API.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@ieblog, thank you for the link. I understand the reasons for not forcing an upgrade, but that does not mean I agree with them. Especially as I cannot see a time when customers will want to spend the time and money in upgrading browsers. Does this mean we will be stuck with IE6 forever? I can see that upgrading browser versions amongst corporations could be expensive in both time and effort, but surely Microsoft could help out there? What is to stop IE maintaining itself? Valve manage to roll out updates to games silently via Steam, forcing all users who want to keep the product active to use the latest version. Surely self maintaining software would be the best idea for everyone? Customers would not have to maintain their browsers themselves, and Microsoft would not have to support and release updates for multiple products. IE6 is hampering web application progress.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Firefox and Webkit are hardware accelerated already. http://www.cairographics.org/ Nice try Dean.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Accelerated 2D graphics in IE9 can mean one of three things: SVG, Canvas or both. So looking forward to hearing more in the future.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What if Microsoft developed a Mac version of IE9. Then all us Mac developers wouldn't have to invest time in keeping VM of Windows running just to test (and re-test) our sites. That would make me happy. Test different versions of IE - like in IE Tester - in IE9 would make me even happier!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"What if Microsoft developed a Mac version of IE9. Then all us Mac developers wouldn't have to invest time in keeping VM of Windows running just to test (and re-test) our sites." With the move to DirectX/Direct2D that is now even less likely to happen, in my opinion.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It would be really great if Microsoft were to build a good web browser for once. I guess this post is like everything else I've seen coming out of Redmond, only full of promises. What about you do things the right way and THEN you communicate about it, instead of talking about a potential future ? Work on supporting CSS, fonts, JS, HTML5, [...], correctly and fully. Work on making it easy to upgrade. Communicate about IE6 being outdated, like Firefox does for Firefox 2. Seriously consider passing tests, instead of proving again that you don't pass them. THEN, expose the work done. Seriously, communication isn't that hard to understand, but Microsoft proves again that not only they can't produce anything worth using, they also don't know how to talk about it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
come on guys, this is not enough. you should try harder!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
This is really fascinating. For the longest time, I feel like we as Windows users have not really been offered a web browser that utilizes the power of our platform, which is all in its fantastic handling of graphics and media. I really felt left out where Apple plugs Safari right into the underbelly of Mac OS X. I can't wait to see what the IE team can do in terms of working with the platform.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It is too early look. I need more.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Uh, what a bunch of whiners in the comments! Switching text rendering to DirectWrite is good. And competing with the other browsers is good, too, even if they have not caught up yet. @ie team: This looks like a promising start. Please keep going and show us more nice features! (Maybe some XHTML+SVG+MathML at last?)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
1)Make it easy to test all popular old versions 6-9 through the developer toolbar. Not just one version back. 2)Developer toolbar needs a lot of TLC - compared to Firebug, it is a real bear to use. 3)Don't ignore our complaints - it isn't always in everyone's best interest to do your own thing. If you've read this far you're on the right track.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
This is really fascinating. For the longest time, I feel like we as Windows users have not really been offered a web browser that utilizes the power of our platform, which is all in its fantastic handling of graphics and media. I really felt left out where Apple plugs Safari right into the underbelly of Mac OS X. I can't wait to see what the IE team can do in terms of working with the platform.

Safari runs so well on Mac OS X because it has a frecken Quartz backend. http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/ But Webkit is MODULAR and supports multiple backends. Microsoft could write a Direct2D backend for Webkit. This would make more sense.

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
lies, you need to check your assumptions before you start accusing people of lying. Just because there are experimental builds doesn't mean that it's what's in the real build used by FF Windows users. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_2/GFX/3D_Accel "Gecko SHOULD take advantage of these hardware capabilities, both for performance and for visual features."
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Are you kidding guys? Everyone who sais that this is "awesome" or "great" has no clue! I mean IE9's scripting engine is even slower than FF 3.6's and 32/100 in the Acid3 test is less than poor. Seriously!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
This is very impressive. It's like the first browser war 13 years ago... IE had a significant disadvantage, but had by far the fastest developement speed, and brought many things in first (css1 was an IE first, I think frames too). Hardware accelerated rendering in browsers is something I've always wondered about, why it wasn't included in browsers. But I guess it is now possible to do this, and stay relatively compatible, thanks to the new desktop composition in Vista / Win7. Before that, you would've had to code a whole 3d framework for it (and render it in a GDI window), but now all of that is built-in the OS. But, given how slow you release new versions of IE, I'm sure that all other major browsers will also support it by the time you come out with IE9. Still, wishing you the most luck on the new release.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2006/12/8409.ars "Firefox's transition to Cairo is significant. Written in the C programming language, the versatile Cairo graphics library is a vector-based drawing API that supports a wide variety of backends. Cairo can take advantage of hardware acceleration where available and simplifies cross-platform graphics application development by providing an internally consistent and cohesive framework that emphasizes platform-independence. Similar in function to Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly called Avalon) and Apple's Quartz 2D, Cairo has been widely adopted within the open source community and is currently used in numerous open source applications and frameworks including the GTK toolkit and GNOME desktop environment." 3D hardware acceleration is coming in the form of 3d transforms (which I highly doubt IE will support), but that's not the same as "hardware acceleration" in general. Firefox is capable of sending vector information directly to the GPU for processing, as opposed to rasterizing it. THAT's hardware acceleration.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Cool stuff, can you also make IE9 a mandatory update? otherwise we would have to deal with IE6 through IE9, it'll be easier for the world if IE users will only be using IE9 :)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Fix IE's problems before going for improvements. End of story.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Would have been so easier for you to integrate WebKit and then concentrate on the UI and other features. It's nice that IE9 supports some CSS3 properties but I would be way nicer that you communicate to your clients about IE6 and 7 being so outdated. And, as a developer (and I guess everyone here is more or less a developer) I'd be way more enthusiastic about hearing that IE6 is dead than hearing about the brand new IE that will do stuffs Opera does since 2006.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Did DOM 2 support make it ? Some of these specs are 10 years old, were co-edited my MS, and we are still waiting for IE to support it... It's nice to focus on bells and whistles, but it would be great to have real support for other stuff as well...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Oh, please... leave us alone once and for all! You left Trident for years and we're still paying the consequences. Too late for playing the Pr0s now, sorry.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I cannot share the excitement. I would like MS to stop producing IE altogether.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Don't make it fancy, just catch up to what the rest of the world is doing. And make an attempt at ridding of the world of IE6 please.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Oh why doesn't IE just hopp on the WebKit train? More than that, I'd encourage MS to force their userbase to abandon IE 6. I'm developing for asian/east asian markets and we still have like 35-40% IE 6 usage and about 90% IE usage over all.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I would also state that my opinion is that Microsoft should go the way of Apple and Google and just use Webkit. Also, I would like to vent my own frustrations with the current IE soup that plagues web developers to this day. Please, if you really care about developers like your CEO says that you do, fix IE once and for all and let us out of this unholy nightmare bred of Cthulhu, Ballmer, and Gates.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Sooo, you're saying use one of the other browsers as they are much faster than ie8 today?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Unfortunately, IE8 doesn't fully support CSS2.1. For example if you write a block of text and position an anchor over it (because standards doesn't allow including blocks in anchors) you will not able to click on anchor. Cursor will be I-like and aimed to do text actions. This is bug from previous versions of IE that wasn't fixed. One other bug that semitransparency in PNGs doesn't work with alpha-filter. One only chance to make work it is to use combined AlphaImageLoader and Alpha filters which is much more slower (read: don't even try—your business will lose money). It's pity that Microsoft doesn't mentions Opera browser. It may takes only 1% in global market share, but it plays more appreciable role in local markets. So, it's one of the most popular browsers in Russia. Developers from Microsoft are aware of it, I know. Does 3D acceleration means that on systems with fast (or not so slow) CPU and slow GPU (such as integrated graphics) browser will work much slower as it take place with filters now?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
How can one single visual 'nice-to-have' be more meaningful from the point of view of web developers than a test that checks the support of more than a hundred aspects from a wide range of standards? Being able to install IE9 on Win2000 and up would be much more 'meaningful' for web developers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Where is the download link? Why can’t we just test what you’ve done?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Great news ! I appreciate the way you've put your concentration on things that really matters, and not specially 'hypes' found on the web at the moment. Hum, BTW, still no date for the next IEChat ?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Many people here have stated that webkit would be a nice solution. Microsoft don't have a problem about using webkit because it's open-source (BSD or LGPL), don't delude yourselves. If anything, Microsoft would probably like to switch to webkit. The trouble is that they need to maintain backwards-compatibility with the kludge-ridden history of internet explorer. There are a lot of Enterprise systems out there using legacy web based front-ends to their databases. They can't switch to webkit, their system is hopelessly proprietary and won't work. Microsoft's IE team have a lot of hard work ahead of them. Achieving standards compliance while detecting old-school proprietary code is difficult to say the least. Why would the IE team want to waste time on the <video> tag, SVG or accelerated canvas? Don't they want Silverlight to fill that gap?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
...and still no word on a builtin download manager. is it in plans?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Ok, why don't you just do what other browsers do and THEN do what other browsers don't do? I would love to hear a statement like: "Dear web developers, we did it: CSS 3, latest JavaScript standard and HTML 5 full support. No 'this is draf' excuses anymore. We also stopped walking the wrong direction: No rendering modes, no vml, no active x and so on - just the standards perfectly. Oh, by the way we have that cool hardware rendering stuff that makes our browser very fast." I believe most web developers dream something like that. But this post sounds like: "Dear web developers, we did it - not, again: Well aaaahm, anyway, we have that hardware rendering that others don't have." Please stop that behaviour. We aren't silly. If someone writes down history of the web between 2000 and 2020, I'm sure he will write something like: "The web as we know it today was a long evolution. A lot of techniques rised and fall. Not always the best browser had the highest percentage. We could be 5 years ahead if IE would have join the right way a few years earlier." So please make a big deal - not a pseudo deal again. IE 7 and 8 failed. Don't make mistakes again. I would love to praise IE and to be able to give you positive feedback.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@Dean - Questions that need answering re: IE9 01.) ECMAScript EventHandling - in or out? 02.) Canvas - in or out? 03.) SVG - in or out? 04.) HTML5 Audio/Video - in or out? 05.) VBScript - out? 06.) VML - out? 07.) XHTML - in or out? 08.) MathML - in or out? 09.) @font-face - in or out? 10.) base64 - in or out? 11.) GeoLocation - in or out? 12.) Accelerometer - in or out? 13.) Web Workers - in or out? 14.) new HTML5 input types - in or out? 15.) fully public (respectable) bug tracking - in or out? 16.) WinXP support - in or out? Plus - Mobile IE (WinCE/HTC/...) is it safe to say that this vector of IE is dead?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Nice to see that IE9 is shaping up to compete with the other browsers in terms of standards compliance. As a web developer I'm very happy with that. Good work! On a side note, what are you doing to do about a doctype switch this time? Another version for IE9? I hope not.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Oh, forget HTML5! Forget canvas, and CSS 3, and Acid3, and SunSpider, and even jaggies. But implement XHTML support! Unlike the aforementioned, it's an old, stable technology. What's taking so long?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Well done, you're almost catching up to existing browsers. Congratulations. Please, think of the internets: adopt webkit or give up and do something else.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I am not a Web developer, I do arguably more interesting Windows CE stuff, but I did not have issues with rendering of my HTML when I had to code something (even in IE6). In fact, I like original idea of the Web Page, which flexibly adapts to any screen resolution and allows to change font size. All these "professional" Web "designers" use a lot of fixed pixel layout and SMALL fixed-sized fonts. Having created problems both for users and themsleves by fixing font sizes and using pixel grid, they now blame rendering engine. The same goes for Javascript engine. I did not have any performance issues in IE7 with Gmail/Google Reader. And I am the person who went decreasing nested menu showing delay in TweakUI for XP because it was too slow. So complaining about JS performance is strange. Having too much performance to win in silly JS tests can have its drawbacks too: there was an interesting test publushed a couple of months ago when web browsing in IE consumed less battery than browsing in other browsers. As I am an end user when it comes to Web, I've tested different Web browsers and I have encountered only 1 (one) site that IE had issues with - it's Gizmodo.com (and reason is obvious). On the other hand, all other browsers had a issues with numerous web sites. Firefox produces very ugly looking pages. Webkit-based browsers have better looking output but crash too often and there are sites which look very bad. Google Chrome (and, IIRC, Safari) produce larger fonts than other browsers. That's an interesting thing, because it looks ok, but, if web developers will start using smaller fonts, then these site will be harder to read in IE. I am not sure, if it's intentional. Technical reasons aside, Microsoft should not adopt Webkit because Web will be less usable then, at least 2 years. And I don't believe in perfect code. But code coverage matters, and when it comes to IE, I am pretty sure that many people in world have been trying to break it. I cannot say the same about Webkit.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Great to have some news, please keep it coming regularly! Reading into the fact that acid3 is shown and since that contains some SVG tests. I hope we can assume SVG will be included.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Your browsers are bad and you should feel bad.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
The webkit route would be good but then you'd have layer on activex support... among other proprietary IE features. I wonder which is easier... evolving IE or regressing Webkit.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@John: - Why are you giving web developers a really hard time? We have to test in IE6, IE7, IE8 and then IE 9 :( (Please use WebKit, problem solved!!!!) How do you figure? As long as IE 6-8 are supported, we have to test in them. Just switching the rendering engine doesn't change the fact that testing is needed, it would just mean 9 doesn't take nearly as much extra work. What should be done is to cut support to IE6 and let those stubborn users have their way and force IE7+ users into consistent upgrades to IE9 and beyond. That way the developers can officially do away with IE6 development and only worry about the current IE version. MS should look at Firefox. Whenever there's an update, I know about it pretty quick, because the browser tells me so, prompts me to upgrade, and handles the installation process. No real work on my part. Windows updates do much the same thing, but the only things that are really labeled 'Important' regarding IE are security patches. Well, they may see it that way at MS, but I think true web progression is important too.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please adopt webkit, or update IE8 before introducing another useless browser. Your browser would get no traction if it wasn't for the fact its included in all Windows PCs and auto-updated. If the fact that bundling browsers that aren't updated (IE6) isn't destroying the Internet, then your blatent ignorance of standards is. Considering you probably have more resources at your disposal then any other browser producer, you're just so miserably behind.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Look, I am happy that Microsoft is still working on IE. When the browser can render and perform as well as Firefox and IE, I'll stop blocking its users from using my newer web applications. The basic problem isn't that I don't want customers who use IE 6/7/8, the problem is that I can't afford the time that it takes to develop a site that works decently in all of the versions of IE. Getting Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, etc... to render properly is easy, and I can ensure a quality experience. I don't feel that the current versions of IE offer a quality web application experience so I don't support them. I don't want to stop anybody from improving their software, but seriously for everyone that wants Microsoft to embrace WebKit or Gecko, forget it, competition is good. Just stop supporting IE, tell your users to download another browser until IE works as well as its competition. Complaining is useless without action.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
But I guess the larger question might be: Will IE 9 be Chrome Frame compatible???
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Good efforts, but seriously, please don't release IE9 if it ultimately fixes some bugs and creates some other bugs. Unless IE9 has major improvements, I'm talking reducing most (if not all) of the rendering/css bugs, also with ZERO new bugs; unless that is done it will just mean another conditional statement in the <header>. I mean this is becoming ridiculous, both IE7 and IE8 are just broken DIFFERENTLY. So unless you guys are able to introduce ZERO new bugs, please don't even bother.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Love IE. Just add Auto-Update feature in IE6-IE7-IE8 to upgrade IE9 just like FF. so after auto-update all we have is IE9. so exciting about IE9. IE Rocks.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I don't know why they put comments on this blog. They don't care what we, web developers, have to say unless it's someone telling them how good of a job they are doing. This is a poor looking browser to add to a list of poor browsers. I don't care what phase of development they are in. They need to support what webkit and gecko support before trying to outshine them. It's just a complete joke.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Rounded corners and better font display are just toys. It would be much better and more productive for everybody to support directly either the <canvas> tag (HTML 5) or SVG (javascript games, etc). But i guess that would result in a conflict with the Silverlight department?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Top of the list priority for me (probably mentioned elsewhere):
Fix DOM so it can style "unknown" elements by default. This way we'll have HTML5 support in IE9!
Apart from that, go with the flow I guess :)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Rounded corners. Faster scripts. More selectors. Awesome. I'm really beginning to like IE lately.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Rounded corners, wow! This is so advanced and modern. 32 out of 100 in Acid3, cool! No one else can do more!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It looks very good, looking forward to IE9! Can't wait to see the performance boost of using Direct2D and DirectWrite. And I still think IE8 is the best browser on the market today!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@blabla yeah there's nothing fancy at all about what Google or Facebook does. Except that Facebook's entire site is going to be Ajax soon. And Google? Yeah those guys really do some plain boring stuff. FAIL!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Oh, and stop with the webkit lunacy. Yes, Apple uses it, but Apple is in a entirely different position. HTML rendering is a very important cornerstone of many Microsoft products: Visual Studio, Windows itself, the whole .net stuff, Office and so on. They all depend on IE to some extend. It's just not a wise business decision to outsource such an important functionality. You lose control and depend on another entity for your core products. No one would do this. Apple can do this, because their bread and butter products are not their developer stuff.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
OK,firstly keep it up! Nice to see that you are focusing on some standards, these are all great. However. The rest of the world already did and have moved on. So the question is will there be any of the really important stuff, like HTML 5: WebSockets WebWorkers ApplicationCache I really hope so, for IE's sake. Keep up the work
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
There is indeed NOTHING fancy about the google site. HTML wise that is. Facebook is going Ajax, and? Ajax has nothing to do with HTML 5 or CSS3.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"Oh, and stop with the webkit lunacy. Yes, Apple uses it, but Apple is in a entirely different position. No one would do this. Apple can do this, because their bread and butter products are not their developer stuff." You do know that Apple created WebKit right? They took the buggy and outdated base of KHTML and brought it into the 21st century through many years of development. It went from being the ugly duckling to being the fastest, most feature rich rendering engine out there. Also, AFAIK Safari is already hardware accelerated, by virtue of running on Quartz (in OS X).
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
^^^^ Thank you Drew, well said.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I just want someone to officially answer this: Why not use WebKit for IE9 on standards-mode sites and keep Trident for quirks-mode (for compatibility)? As long as there is an actually good reason, I'll honestly accept it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"You do know that Apple created WebKit right? They took the buggy and outdated base of KHTML and brought it into the 21st century through many years of development. It went from being the ugly duckling to being the fastest, most feature rich rendering engine out there." And? Doesn't change the fact that their core products are not in the same category as microsoft's core products.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Just another web log comment.. pay no attention. IE Team: Great job guys. Really. No sarcasm. I applaud the IE Team for focusing (in IE7 and 8) on the USER instead of the designer. While the designers do like to complain long and loud, as a USER of IE I am very happy. It's solid, renders well, and renders fast (even on 5 yr old hardware). Most of my time is spent READING or LOOKING at a web page. From that point of view, a couple milliseconds difference in rendering between IE and the WebKit croud is nigh imperceptable. IE waits for me at the same speed as all other browsers. Again, you are doing a great job. Keep at it!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@blabla "I am not a IE groupie by the way, just annoyed by modern web devs and their desire to clutter up more stuff." If you actually bothered to read and understand the HTML 5 spec you would know it's purpose is the opposite of what you stated. I get the feeling you don't know what your talking about.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"AFAIK Safari is already hardware accelerated, by virtue of running on Quartz (in OS X)." That's like saying IE is already hardware accelerated, because it runs on DWM (in Vista)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Chart 1 is very impressive. How did you collect the data for it? Can you release the code for the application used to measure those stats? I think it will be very useful for designers to understand what the consequences of their code mean to the performance of the browser.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
If you're someone on the IE9 team, please sort it out, and by that I mean make it work properly (css etc) or sabotage it (make it install a good browser on first load or something.) My word I hate IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@blabla Have you ever checked google maps ? Or gmail ? Yes, Google is VERY Fancy. Well, it is for IE, not for Firefox.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"When any browser improves, the Web improves. It looks to me like Microsoft is getting more serious about improving the Web. This is good news and the IE team should be hearing our positive feedback and encouragement"
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Glad you're acknowledging you have a major performance problem relative to other modern browsers and are attempting to fix it. Although I don't know why you would reveal you're doing hardware acceleration as part of that. Given your release schedules versus your competitors, that gives them about four releases to implement it before you ship 9. Anyway, hopefully you're going to get betas out early. You have a lot of users that are starting to give up on IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
As so many other web-developers I am very fond of SVG. It's scalable, clickable, easy to understand, light-weigth and very fast. Every time when I have finished a new website I have to spend hours to convert everything to VML; Notice that not everything looks the same; spending more hours to shift everything in place etc. This in fact more than doubles the lines of code that I have to write and maintain. So inline SVG support would be nice.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Until there's native SVG support and performance across the board that beats the other available choices, I don't really care.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
If the IE-team with feel any of the pain webdevelopers go through each day trying to support all these different IE-versions, they would be in constant 24-hour pain. Really market share because of bundeling is the only reason we even try to support it. Please, please, make a browser which supports older platforms, something (alteast XP). And make something which makes sure people don't have to deal with IE6 never ever again. Make sure people can upgrade easily. Do something useful or don't do anything at all. Just creating a new version is not something useful if it doesn't replace the old versions.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Here's the bugzilla SOLVED cairo tracking bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322938
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"Have you ever checked google maps ? Or gmail ? Yes, Google is VERY Fancy. Well, it is for IE, not for Firefox." That's not fancy. Unless you consider bing to be "fancy" as well: http://www.bing.com/maps/?FORM=Z9LH9 With fancy I meant what you loons here want. And google is pretty conservative in that regard, their site doesn't look like zengarden. That's how google got successful in the first place: While their competitors had fancy, cluttered webpages with tons of useless functions, google.com consisted just of two buttons and a search bar. But I guess you guys here can't even remember the days when altavista and lycos were big. Stop being altavista wannabes. You've got now stable css 2.1 and html 4 (fully supported by all browser, standard and all), deal with it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm really hoping text-shadow support will make it into the release.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Make it easy for webdevelopers to test with older versions. IE6, IE7, IE8 and probably IE9 all have their own bugs. New bugs in things that worked in previous versions. Make it so the original renderengines/jscript-engines are placed side by side on disk and can be tested seperately. But most of all make sure IE6-users get something newer. Tell these companies to stop using IE6. Don't tell them you'll still give them any support.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Awesome IE! Rounded corners in 2010 is like Chevy announcing they're coming out with a car that will compete with the 2008 Prius. ( ._.)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Artificially making a browser not support XP should be criminal monopolistic behavior.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
>I'm impressed, can't wait for what else is coming in IE 9! Firefox 3.6 is in beta...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Cute. Very web developer knows anything from Microsoft will have issues. In this carbon centric world, do us all a favour and use webkit and be done with it. By continuing drag IE along you are forcing many people to spend longer hours at work thus emitting ever more carbon. Please think of planet and use webkit!!!!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
im with the other guy that said adopt the webkit engine. Its open source and will always be more up to date than IE ever will. Microsoft I love windows 7 but as a web designer there needs to be an automatic updater or something to get people moving from IE6 on up. Its such a hassle having to test on so many browsers already. IE was great. it brought us to where we are today, but accept defeat and move to an open internet standard...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It's pretty amazing to read some of the comments here. IE is widely used guys. If you're not able to develop for IE why not learn how. Keep up the good work. By all means do the standard things, but please lets get back to pushing the browser forward. Browsers have been held back for maybe a decade, a lot of useful things that should have happened haven't.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Am I to understand that you are BOASTING about PROGRESS by showing off how you're:

still dead last in a javascript speed test,
still dead last in the ACID3 standards test,
still can't pass a CSS selectors test everyone else nailed long ago That's some very impressive results alright, I must say. Keep it up. Oh and whatever you do, don't make any attempts to actually add anything of genuine use to web developers like xhtml, SVG, MathML, webforms, media queries, <video>, <audio>, web-workers, server-sent events, @font-face, canvas, web sockets, geolocation or even any attempt to actually support proper DOM APIs. That would just be silly.

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm happy to see rounded corners and faster Javascript, but it seems like pretty small potatoes compared to what I was hoping for - at least 2008-era HTML5 support with video, audio, SVG, and Canvas. Come on guys, you are the wealthiest company on Earth, and supposedly developers are your prime audience. So why is IE universally hated among web developers?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"Please stop developing Internet Explorer in favor of better browsers like Firefox and Chrome. It's been so hard designing for IE." +1 to that.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Good stuff. Looking forward to its release. I agree with some of the other comments, native accelerated canvas/video support would be a great addition.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
But will you finally add really CSS opacity and not the lousy Filter version? It's a nightmare trying to animate stuff in IE with the filter not working in opacity. We need true opacity at the CSS level like the other browsers
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Hey it could be worse .. people could still be using IE6. Oh wait ...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@cal - of course my best practices don't include an experience that performs poorly. Of course standards aren't the only thing that is important, but you're off your rocker if you think that drawing performance and text quality (which should've been handled properly eons ago) is more important than being able to properly digest and display 100% compliant, semantically written code to display the entire page PROPERLY. User Experience designers know how to make sure things work as they are supposed to, within the given constraints. That works to our advantage and disadvantage. In this instance, it is most certainly a disadvantage. The problem is that the IE team's goals & milestones now, and seemingly when IE9 releases, are actively hindering innovation. Feature sets we can use at-will with other browsers are ignored, in favor of arbitrary decisions that are made out of scope and out of context from what is going on in the real world. A good generally true analogy: You are Michael Phelps, the best Olympic swimmer to date (Google Chrome, FireFox). You are babysitting your 4 year old nephew, who can't swim (Internet Explorer). You decide to take this nephew to the pool (The Internet). You are forced to wear water-wings in the pool, because your 4 year old nephew can't swim without them. Chrome/FireFox are forced to perform at sub-par levels on the internet because Internet Explorer is years behind in development.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Your browser is bad and you should feel bad. Stop messing around and use Webkit, what's your problem!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
WebKit would be nice ... but this front end developer will be very happy if you can just get some of the CSS3 working, improve overall script performance, and basically mimic webkit. :) thanks team. but don't make cowering remarks just because a spec is in draft. these days specs get adopted b/c they are a good idea front end developers use, not just because one or another big company says they are good.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
People keep focusing on displaying webpages... I stopped using IE in favor of chrome because a new tab comes up significantly more quickly. In chrome, a tab appears instantly. In IE, it takes multiple seconds. Whats the point of having webpages rendered quickly, if the fricken tab takes time to come up? IE9 team, I really do want to use your browser again. Please just make it so everything happens FAST. I don't care about these webpage display tests where the differences are barely noticeable- just make it comparable to FF and Chrome, and you've got me back.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It's all catchup, but it's good catchup. It's appreciated, keep it up.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Is ie 9 being developed for win xp? Captcha: 548
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What's really embarrassing here is that other's can't support IE features because the code is locked down, but IE developers could literally look at how Webkit and Gecko solve these issues and use that code - there is no excuse for performance this bad. Why not make Trident open-source, that way FOSS developers could fix all your mistakes, and actually port versions to other operating systems.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Can the next folks who say "use webkit" read this first please: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/10/there_is_no_web.html The sense of entitlement ("we demand that you tell us all your plans now!") and control ("we demand that you make people upgrade from IE6") is bizarre.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Maybe it's just me but I think people these days want things now, not in forty seconds (http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F02.html). I'd like to see a quicker release schedule for IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
No, really, stop making IE. Just bundle an open source browser with your OS, and make EVERYBODY happy. The world will not progress properly until you do so.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Well since this is what MSFT has announced thus far - history indicates that we shouldn't expect anything more in terms of fixes just a half dozen useless new features instead of supporting standards. Thus my prediction:
no SVG support
no Canvas support
no W3C event handlers
an ACID3 score of no higher than 54
no audio/video tags
no extended HTML input types
no XHTML support
no web workers
no improved developer tools
no new addon architecture
no @font-face support
no fix for the published WMP privacy bugs - still blaming other browser vendors and the WMP team for a proven IE bug very new technology that MS will sweep under the rug.
no resource bundle support
no SPDY support Things that will be added that developers don't want or need.
something that allows WPF/MS-only technology to be embedded/used in the browser rather than support an equivalent web standard
more non-@font-face based font support to further ruin the cross-browser extended font support effort
additional FuzzyType[TM]-like enhancements that may enhance readability at the expense of other browsers by yet again diverting from published public standards
only Vista+ OS support. This will make developers scream and pull their hair out trying to get a VM set up for multi-browser testing
two new "features" like slices and accelerators that will just clutter the browser and not take off in any way just like the previous two didn't Key Finder for 2010/2011 when IE9 proves the above predictions correct: ASDF-QWER-ZXCV-PREDICTIONS-FOR-IE9-RTM
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
From your chart at the top, the only reason why IE 9 even looks in the ballpark, is that you scaled the chart to show IE 7 performance, which was so terrible, all the browsers JavaScript ran like lightning compared with it. Redo the chart scaled so IE 9 is full height (so, don't show IE 7/8 performance) so we can really gauge the relative performance of IE 9 to the other browsers. All the current chart shows is that IE 9 isn't completely out to lunch compared with the other browsers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
So I guess Opera is now the one behind, since Opera still doesn't support corner-radius (and no word on when it will be supported)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Any chance of IE nightlies? As a web developer this has been a great win for Firefox, WebKit & Chrome to help us keep track of what's coming - I'd love to have the same for IE, particularly if it were standalone for automated testing.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@dave, you can gauge the IE9 performance by looking at the numbers on the left, so IE9 is under 2000ms, while Firefox 3.6 is somewhere around 1500ms, Safari and Chrome are under 1000ms. It seems IE9 will actually be faster than Opera 10 in Sunspider (until Opera gets Carakan that is).
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm a web developer and I feel I speak for many of my co-workers when I say that:

IE6 is the worst thing that has happened to us.
we don't care about smooth font rendering as much as we care about HTML5 tags, SVG
we would be overjoyed if Microsoft dropped Trident and adopted Webkit - there are too many browsers for us to support already and Trident browsers are frankly the worst. With Webkit IE our situation would improve immediately and our lives would get easier. I don't mean this as a troll. I don't have a "sense of entitlement" and I don't expect Microsoft to actually use Webkit. I'm just restating what most web developers feel.

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Why won't they switch to Webkit? Google and Apple managed to do it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Ian Muir. Why no Webkit. Google and Apple using it, it's available there for Microsoft to use also. That way they can focus on other things. It seems silly that they continue to maintain their own renderer which is so behind others.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Could you guys make this one compatible with everybody else? IE breaks all of my web apps. All of my web apps are full of crutches because of IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Breathe. Take your time. Get it right, for once...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
once again a full mark of FAIL for using a JPEG for the bar chart.. then converting it to a PNG to post on this blog.. when will you folks learn? PNG Only for screenshots! DO NOT USE JPEGs unless you are taking photographs. Don't forget if you have ClearType running to turn it off before you take the screenshot so that the image isn't ruined by sub-pixelation.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
A new download manager for sure .Saving webpages in ie is still a pain
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Well done guys on making the leaps forward from IE6 to IE8. You are getting much closer to providing a consistent platform for us web developers to build upon, but please endeavor to continue this progress and not go in to propriety feature mode before the compatibility job has been finished. I know you have some way to go to get there but we web developers have benefited hugely from your recent advances. Please keep your css3 and HTML5 implementations inline with current browsers as this gives us something to build upon as we try to take advantage of the advancment in browser technology. Remember we are an important part of your client base who in large part deliver the web experience to your customers and already take advantage of other browsers css3 compatibility like rounded corners and opacity etc, so give us the opportunity to give a great cross browser experience to all of your customers and not just the Mozilla and webkit and opera browsers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please, please, please just get the basics right, and make it so you can extend it, rather than having to wait another 4 years for a new version. Just get it right please please please, I'd rather have standards than a sprinkling of CSS3, theres no point putting in new stuff if the underlying stuff doesn't work!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Few requirements for IE9:

Must work on WinXP (including the hardware acceleration).
For the hardware acceleration, it must fall back to software if the GPU doesn't fit the requirements. And, in cases where older GPUs can do hardware acceleration, but are actually slower than than the CPU, there must be a way to configure IE9 to always use software rendering. Even if IE9 can use heuristics to determine the best mode, there still must be a advanced user setting as sometimes the user knows best.
With <!DOCTYPE html>, IE9 must support addEventListener and EventTarget etc.

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Here's your chance to Just make amends with a world of hateful developers by just adopting webkit. 99% of users don't even know what a rendering engine is, or that it's different from one browser to the next. You can still have your IE look and feel, but please, please, please... just use webkit. Otherwise you just breed hate and conspiracy theories like this one: http://joreteg.com/post/114081856/is-microsoft-purposely-holding-back-the-web
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I find all the "adopt webkit" comments interesting because 3 years ago they were adopt Gecko.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@"Developer" The calls three years ago for 'adopt gecko' were correct, and still just as valid now. Webkit is currently more advanced, but Gecko is still progressing at a faster pace than IE appears to be. Given the number of extremely talented folks working for Microsoft, I don't see why there isn't a huge push from Microsoft to invest the resources necessary to make IE a top-notch browser. Perhaps there is, internally, but from an outsider's perspective - it doesn't look that way.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
by the time this released all the other browsers will have this AND BETTER
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Wow, these comments are unbearable. I feel like I have to apologize, on behalf of all the thinking citizens of the net. I'm happy to see you driving IE's standards up so far in the past few years. I can see, from the above comments, how the mistakes of the IE6 team has damaged your reputation so horribly. I'd like to believe all of Microsoft is coming around. Office 2007 is beautiful, Windows 7 sounds like it runs amazingly, and IE is quickly swooping back to a semblance of standards. Just make sure it's easy for developers to test in IE6/7/8. Keep at it!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm most curious to know what version of javascript will be supported: AFAIK, IE8 is still using 1.5, while the rest of the market has moved on to 1.7 or even 1.9, and there are some features in the later versions I'd really like to be able to use some day (in, you know, 15 years or so after IE8 is finally no longer a consideration...)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Still it has a way to go to stand aside with Chrome and Firefox. Also see the flexibility given by Firefox to develop a plugin/addon using XUL and JavaScript, but some one even can not think of creating a new plugin/addon on IE because of its complexity of using COM/ATL/WTL/C++. I can only wish if Microsoft really think of it to give simpler plugin/addon development process for developers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
We need better DEVELOPER TOOLS, or atleast the ability to allow someone else to build them (think Firebug). Please...
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It's kind of hard to get interested in this knowing that XP users probably won't be getting access to it. I hope MS will prove me wrong on that point, though.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Just focus on security, speed and standards - these are the main pain points with IE today. Sam
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
For 100 million USD a year (which is MS budget for IE) I think you can do better than that. Sorry but for those people that applause this progress, it seems you are not developers and you care nothing about standards. Keep going, you are 3 years behind!!!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
We don't want more IE. Its better if you use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera or any other (not IE based).
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
The only explanation I have for the excessive hate and rage postings is the recent release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. It's a shame, really! As anyone can clearly see, the IE team is now fully committed to standards and performance. OK, the've fallen behind again since IE8 as Chrome and Firefox versions are being released in even more rapid succession recently. But the IE team is on the right track, and if they could come up with such fundamental improvements in just three weeks, we can look forward to lots of improvements in the next months. I only wish that the IE team would release more often. We've seen Firefox 3.0, 3.1, 3.5, and we'll see 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0. And then we have IE8, probably 12 months to wait, and then IE9.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Looks great but what about border-image and canvas support?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Why not just give up? Adopt Webkit or something. I mean, if you're this far behind and you're not selling the product and making money on it, what is there to gain?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
No, they are NOT on the right track. They are, as always, throwing everything that is standards-compliance down the drain and making every single developer who's not using their own tools for developing hate them. 32 on acid3?!? This is the end of 2009. 32/100 was expected WHEN ACID3 WAS RELEASED. Any modern browser would score 90+ (the two browsers i actually use score 93 and 100), 32 means your browser is BROKEN. No canvas-support? Go IE-team! No SVG-support? Let's cheer for the redmond-team! This is a complete and utter trainwreck, just drop it already. Just compile WebKit as a DLL and write a nice little window that wraps the renderer and call it a day. And be happy that your stuff isn't open source, because if other people in the business could actually see the mess of a browser you're writing, you'd never get another job in the industry. It's just THAT bad.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I really hate Internet Explorer, but i must say: Congratulations. This is a really good news, and I hope that this update will come ASAP, so i might reconsider. Now the question is how MS will encourage the IE6 and IE 7 to update to IE 9, so all the web design could move ahead?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@lepe: I'm not sure if someone lied to you or you just like to make things up, but Microsoft has never disclosed what they spend on IE on a yearly basis. They have not disclosed the number of employees that work on it either. So, while you can say: "Microsoft makes lots of revenue" you cannot honestly claim anything about how much they spend on developing IE.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
wow, this is really great news for all developers around the world. great work microsoft, hope this keeps up!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What i miss as a developer in IE is tools to debug apps.. this is the main reason for developers to adopt Firefox cause it has fire bug which is fun to work with. IE has to meet up to this. it must build a better developer Tool bar that what it has.. IE 8 does have a tool but its so Slooow to work with.. and makes my PC hang.. I like to See IE with better developer support. and I think if they do that.. it will beat firefox and chrome.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Be sure to take a look at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 before deciding it won't run on XP or the XP version will be a half-baked GDI one.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"Will it run on XP?" Good question, in worst case it will be Vista , 7 browser only. I see it running under XP with disabled D2D acceleration.But all that acceleration thing is dust in ppls eyes,i think they are hiding their proprietary analog to canvas and even WebGL. I dont even hope for 100/100 Acid3 test that sounds like SF. Good that they finally will rework their JS VM to meet today's expectations.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@Hank: Here is the reference of those 100 million USD. http://news.cnet.com/2009-1032-995681.html?tag=toc
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I was hoping allong with many others in the comments that HTML5 also was supported in IE9.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@Lepe: You do realize that article gets the $100 million figure from a decade ago, prior to IE6?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
OMG, what's the aggregate noun for "webtards?" Software development is hard. If it were easy, it would be called "English," you could make it up as you went along, and you would get a college degree in it without trying. Development is not easy. It takes work to actually have "customers" (aka "vistors") have a good experience. Standards won't set you free (people write them, they're vague, and there's a shortage of real test suites). Whining won't set you free. And neither Google nor Webkit will set you free.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Thanks MS, it's clear that your are focussing on the right priorities. I appreciate the fact that you continu to work on IE. I'm confident the experience for both users as developers will be improved significantly again with the IE9 version. A lot of people seem to 'hate' (?) MSFT and find it necessary to bash on msft on each and every corner of the web, I think that is outrageous! If you don't like microsoft, go and visit some other websites, instead of hanging around here and spoil every opportunity to have a normal conversation on IE. Disrepectfull comments are so not-done!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
This post would be better if Microsoft actually answered all of the follow-up questions, for example this one: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx#9924710 Even better would be if answers from [MSFT] guys http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx#9924479 and [Microsoft] guys http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx#9924479 showed up with a different background color, so that one could find them easier.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
IE9, most welcome. Developers will undoubtedly be delighted. The real challenge lies in compatibility. Most of my clients still use IE6, and i have a hard time fixing CSS issues across IE6. Will Microsoft drop support for IE6 as the momentum for IE9 is already being gathered?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Another point worth mentioning: Progressive enhancement: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/progressiveenhancementwithcss/ I see lots of websites (e.g., the Wordpress backend, and that is no 'little designer's playground') using phantastic new CSS properties which make the page look all fine in FF, Safari and Chrome (Opera is missing some parts here). Then I turn to IE and the same page looks all chiseled and "normal". The developers just don't care anymore for browsers with poor support for these all-new features. Imagine now a typical IE user looking over his friend's shoulder and seeing a completely different and more elaborate view of the same page he looked to minutes before. Then he switches to the brand-new IE9 expecting to see the same great enhancements. He will notice some rounded corners and stuff, but many enhancements will still be hidden to him (like @font-face with OTF fonts or this: http://labs.silverorange.com/archive/2009/may/ambiance). To put it in a sentence for decision-makers: IE will loose market-share, and a lot, if it can't catch up really fast.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
for those who read french, French version is available here : http://blogs.msdn.com/iefrance/archive/2009/11/19/pdc09-aper-u-des-nouveaut-s-d-internet-explorer-9-pour-les-d-veloppeurs.aspx
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please, think twice before adding new useless obtrusive features, as IE7/8 did. For example

IE7 browser clear type easily destroyed by opacity
IE7 awful click sound on location change
IE8 obtrusive web slices icon on selection -> can be disabled by web developer! etc.. cleartype only for non opacited element

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
PLEASE add tab save feature :)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It's always good to hear about another browser version under development. I'd really like to hear more about HTML 5 markup & CSS3 support. The Direct2D & JavaScript work sounds great. Keep up the good work, Rich
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Internet Explorer is enormously behind other browsers, while users are very sticky to their older IE browser versions. This is a horrible combination for web developers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I want to remind everyone that Microsoft invented XmlHttpRequest and implemented it as a non-standard feature in IE 5.0. So that kind of innovation should be applauded. But that kind of innovation goes BEYOND the standards, not in disregard of them. I too have wasted countless hours dealing with IE and it's problems. Please, Microsoft IE Team, bring IE to 100% Acid3. Even if it means adopting WebKit. You cause tremendous damage to Microsoft by angering developers with a non-standard platform. Just think of the potential meme MS has before them with a 6 / 9 marketing campaign. Make it real, and you really can turn the tide -- for yourselves and everyone else. Get those IE6 people to upgrade to a standards-compliant browser! And please make sure canvas is in there too. At least.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please, please, please -- move to WebKit. IE is losing market shares rapidly, but if you adopt a good rendering engine (no offense) you are right up there with the top browsers available and you will gain the following advantages:

Less rendering development, more time for browsing experience
Less market share loss
Happier dev commity
Endless goodwill from dev community

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
What about Windows XP platform especially with Direct2D? Windows 7 and Vista (soon to be support DIrect 2D) still not ruling the market.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
If you use WebGL, you can be compliant with an open cross-platform standard like OpenGL and you can support the XP platform as well. But no, you insist on using Direct2D/DirectWrite to drive more Windows 7 sales. As I currently see, WebGL does the same thing as what you're proposing with DirectX and it's already present in the Firefox and WebKit nightlies.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I have only one request for the next incarnation of Internet Explorer; MAKE OPENING TABS INSTANT. Badly written addons make opening tabs a pain. Even something that needs to be enabled like Java delays opening tabs by a second. Why not open the tabs instantly and load those addons in the background! I've seen computers where opening a single window for internet explorer until you can enter an URL in the addressbar take 30 seconds. That is just mad. Show the new tab directly, enable the addressbar directly and then commence loading all those addons, these are a lower priority!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please add HTML5 support, canvas support, SVG support, CSS3 support, rounded corners support and decent transparent PNG support. Thanks in advance!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I really hope you will change disturbing popup blocker behavior - i.e. when popup window is blocked, and I temporarily allow a site to show popups, IE reloads a page -- it made me pay some bills twice on my e-banking account. This must not necessarily be only IE issue, but my bank's application, but good browser should not reload a page and do a HTTP post again. Take a look how Chrome does it. Copy good behavior.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
PS: maybe you could just adopt webkit instead of reimplementing everything. developers would be super happy and hug you a lot. Thanks in advance!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
i have to agree this is just another version of ie we will have to write more custom css for. sad fact is on a project i end up spending the majority of my time writing extra css for ie 6, 7, 8 when i could be doing something constructive. If the ie dev team really cared about us they would have the decency to auto wipe old ie browsers and force upgrade to the latest version so we wouldn't waste time and money supporting their past mistakes. its ie that holds us all back from easy standardised coding practices and also holds back advancement of the web and how we view it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Why not ditch Trident and use WebKit or Gecko and then concentrate on giving IE fantastic security and features instead of annoying us all with a faulty, permanently out of date and proprietary rendering engine?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
> Why not ditch Trident and use WebKit or Gecko and > then concentrate on giving IE fantastic security and > features instead of annoying us all with a faulty, > permanently out of date and proprietary rendering > engine? I agree! Adopting webkit would not be giving up. It would be focusing on better features for the user instead of trying to fix a buggy engine. It would be awesome for the community if Microsoft joined the effort to improve a proven engine while enhancing the user experience in other fronts. And you could rename it to Microkit, or maybe Microcute!!! Aw, how lovely!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
We need:

Sub-pixel rendering in text
Sub-pixel positioning for block level elements and character spacing
Rounded corners
PNG transparency
CSS3 Compatibility

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@ironic: " What's the down side of letting IE's rendering engine compete with WebKit? If it is not good enough for you, you can switch over (or keep) to another browser of your choice. IE team is doing a good thing by trying to improve their -free- software. " First, IMHO IE is not FREE as it comes bundled in Windows and we pay Windows licenses. Second, if they were to let the users choose their default pre-installed browser, then I could call that competition. The problem is that many people use IE just because it is already installed and they don't know even the difference between IE and Internet. As you can see, most of the web developers don't use IE as default browser (unless they are .NET developers).
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please move not to WebKit! A web with IE on one side and all others on the other is no better than a web divided between pages supporting Gecko features and pages supporting WebKit features. Go on, push Trident to become a decent rendering engine! Diversity is beautiful.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Saying that IE is FREE is like saying that your "default" car stereo is free just because it was not charged separately.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Nice to see that you guys delete comments
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Can't you just stop? Please? Or at least - at install stage - let people to choose his/hers browser (IExploder/Safari/Firefox/Chrome)?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
An update to IE9 will be mandatory from IE6, IE7 and even IE8 via Windows Update in the near future? Or just to IE8 from versions IE6 and IE7? If not, no one will update to newer versions because they don't know how!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Really Dean, if MS can't handle the pressure to have IE up to time, then leave it and adopt an open source engine... for the sake of all developers I beg you! How many comments you need to realize it? Its unfair for all those people that are working (very hard) to try to bring the best to the web, while we (developers) can't use it just because IE does not support it. So that led us to two alternatives:

wait # years until IE support it (or sometimes just give up as SVG, at it seems it will never be included)
drop IE support and opt to ignore its existance. Even more, push other people to drop it. Don't you see where IE is going? Listen to these people's comments and have a rest.

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Like many people posted above, the best thing me as a developer would be IE9 adopting WebKit. It's tested, known, freely available and with open source. I share the opinion of my fellow developers.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@Manuel Strehl: Sorry, but it is not that way. If IE actually could adopt Webkit or Gecko (which I sincerely doubt it), it would instantly improve web development in so many ways. Why? Standards. Webkit and Gecko follows standards, so we (developers) don't need to worry about which browser are people using. No more <!--[if IE 6]> . That is the whole idea! If IE continue releasing Trident, we will always have to test IE6,7,8,9 and so on.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please switch to WebKit. Apart from the obvious advantages to developers like me, this would help MS to write portable Web apps to compete on the leading smartphones, which are - let's face it - never going to allow Silverlight in.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Hey, this looks promising! But could we also — please please please — have an IE9 frame for IE6?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
It would be great if I could use css without worrying about different rendering by different browsers. I will wait for IE9 to come out but based on previous releases I would think it will be the slowest browser available and the one that causes most problems for web developers. I hope I am wrong. I agree with others - adapt Webkit or Gecko and it will make things easier for everyone - IE developers, web developers, end users. Clearly a win-win situation.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Right, so what you are saying is that you are just about getting to where firefox, safari and opera where about 2 years ago ? Is this a joke ? Give up.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
There might be lots of reasons why you don't support installing multiple versions of IE side-by-side. But how about a plugin for IE 7/8/9 (like ChromeFrame), that simulates IE6? So if you wanted to use a site that only works in IE6, you'd type in ie6:http://wherever.com Or is it not possible for the same reason simultaneous installations aren't possible?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I'm a web developer. Web standards support is my highest priority. IE6 is a major headache. IE7 is better. IE8 is better than IE7. But none comes close to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari for web standards support, which makes life easier for developers. Want developers to love IE9? Make sure it supports web standards. IE9 should:

pass Acid1, Acid2 and Acid3 tests
Wide support for CSS3 I can't imagine I'd be telling anybody that IE9 will finally be a great browser to use. Don't disappoint me this time!! :)

Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"As we improve support in IE for technologies that site developers use, the score will continue to go up." That sounds like you're playing catchup with the developers. Is that how it's being played? I hope it's just me reading that wrong. Developers hold back using some features because the browser support isn't there. The browser support must come first for us to be able to make us of it.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Sounds great, but how do you force people to USE it rather than IE6! LOL.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Just start using Webkit! Support 100% PNG transparency Fix the problem with the alpha: http://translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=http://www.high5five.com/geral/erro-no-internet-explorer-cor-02050a-e-substituida-por-branco/
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Someday in the future people will look back on this article as a milestone in the gradual decline of MS. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Build a worse mousetrap, and the your existing customers will slowly walk away"
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"one of the many limitations of use of non-standard filters" O RLY? And who, exactly, created those non-standard filters in the first place, ignoring other options? I believe they appeared in IE 6, right? Oh no, that was a totally different browser, right? IE9, Now 30% Less Evil! Trust Us!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
"IE9 won't have any of the problems IE8 did. Trust me."
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
As someone who is completely hindered by the poor performance of Webkit's getComputedStyle function, I beg you please do not switch to Webkit. Besides, it looks like you're making good advances with your HTML/CSS rendering engine. It's the JavaScript engine that needs the most work and that is not a part of Webkit to begin with. Heck, just adding addEventListner, removeEventListener, with support for DOMContentLoaded, will quiet many of the critics in that regard. Sure, everyone will have their own little bit that they'd like added (I'd personally love to see ranges and selections covered), but you're not going to be able to satisfy everyone.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
The amount of negativity you guys receive for this great work makes my eyes hurt. Sure, IE6 is bad, but IE8 is actually somewhat useable; and it looks like IE9 will be actually -fun- to work with again.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
IE8 is the best web browser, however there is scope for further improvements. I very much look forward to IE9! There's been a lot of talk about HTML 5 arising from this early look at IE9. I would urge fellow web developers to look beyond the propaganda from certain corporations, and remember that HTML 5 is NOT yet an official specification for the web, it is still a DRAFT and as W3C repeatedly point out adoption at this stage can lead to problems later:- http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/aug/ie8_is_the_most_secure_web_browser#comment111
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Just make it standards-compliant and everyones happy. Please.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Please do not ignore people's comments and do something to improve the reputation of IE. I'm hoping for 100/100 this time. Your users have a tremendous difficulty to upgrade to newer versions so I suggest you better get it right this time. Web developers can't support 4 different versions of a buggy browser. That is impossible!
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I think MS is going to use Direct3D retained mode or DirectDraw for XP. Backporting Direct2D means backporting WDDM. I just won't settle for GDI if Vista and Windows 7 are getting Direct2D and will switch immediately even though I've been loyal to IE so far.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
@IE Developers - congratulations on the JS engine performance. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Ian Muir wrote: "What software company do you all work at where giving up at the first sign of competition is an acceptable policy?" That's a straw man: Microsoft don't make any money from IE. What software company do you work at where time and money is invested in solving problems for which vastly superior solutions are freely available? I hope your VCs are very tolerant.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Hey, guys. PLEASE stop developing IE. There are a lot of GOOD browsers now, let us choice one of them and remove IE from Windows. Why to waste your time trying to fix something that has been always wrong? IE is the WORST browser EVER. Thanks
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
The thing that matters most to me even above standards support is how fast can you deliver since you are way behind? I'd be happy to be proved wrong but I bet IE9 won't RTM in 2010. And if it does, IE11 won't come before 2012. This slow release cycle in a thriving cut-throat web browser market is unacceptable and which is why your market share is continuously falling. Please accelerate your release cycle for IE to become an acceptable browser. I'm so tired of how it is ALWAYS playing catchup. For once, can't you lead the way?
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I guess Microsoft STILL didn't get IE right with version 8. Looking forward to version 13. :)
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
I have a dream ... Please do us all a favour and stop developing browsers. And then with the next Windows Update deinstall all IE Browsers worldwide.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
surveyork: They are not bragging about 32 points in Acid3, they are bragging about how they managed to, in THREE WEEKS OF DEVELOPMENT TIME, to do a 160% improvement over the IE8 results - AND at the same time adding css3 border-radius and selectors, making javascript 6x faster, and adding gpu-accelerated display.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
Wow, so much anger and emotion over a web browser. I hope that MS is listening, developing for IE must really be painful. But beside expressing this anger it would probably be helpful to try and explain to MS exactly what is wrong with IE instead of just asking them to stop developing it... MS is not going to adopt webkit any time soon (one should never say never), so while suggesting it is only fair, it's probably fruitless. Lately, there has even been talks about how webkit is being branched, and how there are differences between different webkit implementations. So adopting webkit might not even prove to solve the problem. We might as well tell Google and all the others to stop developing their browsers and just leave IE on the field. That would give us a standard browser :-). No, instead let's just keep pushing MS (and everyone else) to keep adopting newer standards so that we can push the limits of what's possible in a browser. Let's tell MS that we want them to pass the ACID3 test 100% for IE9 (at least it looks good on paper). Remember browsers IE8 and down do adhere to some standards, they're just old standards. It's fair enough to say that javascript performance is not all there is to the speed of browsing the web, but at the same time it's great to see MS increasing performance. Keep pushing. It sounds like people expect IE to be better than the rest. Being last, but close (and as fast as FF3.5 in js), is not enough to quelch the anger and pain apparently. I read somewhere that IE9 is only 3 weeks into development. By that measure it's good to see how much they've increased performance. Maybe they should do an IE 8.1 release so that we don't have to wait too long to get those javascript performance benefits. Many people seem to forget that there actual was an IE5.5 released between IE5 and IE6, so they could do it again. On the other hand it's kind of shocking if they're in fact ONLY 3 weeks into development. IE8 was officially released on Windows XP, Vista etc. on March 19. Does that mean that MS has been doing nothing with regard to development of IE for 7 months? I'm guessing that the integration that they did of IE into Windows is hurting them now. It probably slows development considerably. Separating IE from Windows sounds like a good idea. It also allows for side-by-side installations of different versions of IE, as it has been suggested in the comments. What a great idea. One thing I would like to see in IE9 is faster startup-times. I use Google Chrome partly because I just starts up faster. Again that's weird, because being so integrated into the os, one would think that IE would be faster, but instead, might the weight of Windows be dragging IE down? DISCLAIMER: I'm a Google Chrome user myself (because it just feels faster) and a program manager NOT a developer, so there are issues that I don't really know about.
Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 18, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@allan: "Three weeks of development" doesn't mean what you think it does. If you look at this e8 post (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/15/engineering-7-a-view-from-the-bottom.aspx), Windows 7 only had 18 weeks of development.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Please keep on developing IE - I've been in the webdev business since Mosaic 0.9 days and I'd hate for this ongoing train wreck to end. Where would I get my entertainment? How would I get my kicks if I was unable to continue writing abusive comments in IE-specific CSS sheets? I used to fear Microsoft, now I pity it. Instead I fear Google.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
32% today on ACID3 is, well, embarrassing when ALL the other major browsers are up in the 90% range. Stop putting up a smokescreen and actually admit that you're performance needs to improve for you to stay competitive.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
I have a suggestion. Why dont you make SilverLight support Native to IE9. No need to download anything special for silverlight.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
They'll get sued if Silverlight was native to the browser.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@developer2 What a stupid post. Back in the days of Netscape, IE was actually innovative. Today it a much different story. They are years behind in compatibility and standards (yes there is that word you hate). Fact of the matter is... standards are the way the web is going and if IE isn't going to follow suite and support it... they are going to be gone like netscape (one can only hope actually)
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Yay , finally implimenting hardware graphics accelleration will be nice , i hate the lag in browsers when you get a page full of pics and you just get a pile of artifacts when scrolling.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
You don't have to cause problems for an entire industry anymore. There is this thing called WebKit.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Honestly, I wish you guys would just back out of the browser game. With the unwillingness to offer updates for improving CSS support and only small steps between major revisions to make IE standards compliant, it's nothing but trouble. There are a few browsers out there, as you're well aware, that are doing far better at making developer's jobs more reasonable than you are. I know your job isn't easy, and that you can't build off another company's rendering engine, however, you can definitely improve. Here are some ideas:

Stop implementing proprietary functions in your browser.
Start offering on-the-fly updates for improving standards compliance (Windows Updates for IE Standards Compliance).
Make it a point to be standards compliant.
Make your rendering engine open source. Get with the program, you've been left behind.

Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Another version of ie to support.... Great! Wow, your only now adding rounded corners. At the very least can you force users to update from ie6 and ie7?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@Ari Thanks for pointing me to the article, which is interesting in its own right. I just can't seem to find what you're referring to, maybe I'm blind :-). AFAICT it says that they had several 3 month long milestones, each with 6 weeks of development and 6 weeks of integration. That would make for much more that 18 weeks. Nevertheless if you're telling me that 3 weeks is actually more than 3 weeks, I'll trust you :-). @chris I kind of get where @developer2 is coming from. He's just saying that he's not worried about standards and that he'd rather have innovation than being bogged down in the loooong process it is to find common ground. Might be stating the obvious, but I think we need both. It'll always be a balancing act. Competition and choice is good!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Although I use FF mostly, I still hope IE to be continued. Still wish IE can have a strike back. With Windows 7, I also wish IE6- user base will drop a lot. BTW, I strongly wish IE can allow multiple version on the same PC. Or even portable.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
To address the IE6 problem, release a portable IE6,IE7,IE8 and encourage corporate user to upgrade the built-in IE to IE9. I think if IE can make ACID3 100%, there would be much less complain. Except the 'graphic world', I think most websites do not use the 'latest standard' since they don't know what browsers their users are using. They are much more conservative than people posting here.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Oh really? You think you can start supporting CSS 3 features when you can barely support 2.1? Really Microsoft? Down with IE.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
A question for the IE team: Have you tried to replace Trident with a modern rendering engine ( Webkit, Gecko, Opera ) ? Recently Google made this with its Google Chrome Frame. Why can't you tackle the "IE problem" this way?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
"I hope you will please consider the sentiments of the majority of users on this post. When you wake up, log in, and check out your code in the morning, just think: "People don't want what I'm coding."

By all statistics, IE is still the market leader. Whether it is by pre-installing or what not doesn't matter much. The raw number matters. Judging business decisions on the comments of this blog? ZOMGROFLCOPTER. This blog just "attracts" the "right" people. It's not a true view on the general population. That's like judging the health of the general population by taking a poll on an AIDS forum.

Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Can you please bring back the inline autocomplete for URLs that was present in IE7 but, for some unbelievably stupid reason, was removed from IE8? The "Smart Bar" that replaced it is a poor substitute, and the worst part about it is that you guys removed functionality when it was not even needed. Please don't make those mistakes again, and please rectify this error in this new version.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
The last comment is mine, misstyped the user name.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@trooty52168 I agree with you that IE should be uninstallable. I the meantime Apple doesn't allow uninstalling Safari 4 either. Not the best of decisions I think. Other than that, there are stil plenty of people who use and like IE and don't care much about other browsers. Just did a search for "uninstall safari osx" and found that at least one person wants to uninstall Safari 4 because it is "a memory hog, slow, unstable and makes other parts of OSX slow too. http://petermerel.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/12/2922615-how-to-uninstall-safari-4 Let's all encourage Apple to stop developing Safari ;-) and let's stick (be stuck) with what we've got. I know, I know, there are probably reasons for the aforementioned problems with Safari 4 and it DOES render javascript faster than IE. Hope people can still see my point.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
32? oh.. silly browser ever :)
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
This is encouraging. However, referring to CSS as "mark-up" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Ive given up on testing in IE when designing a website. Too much trouble! If a visitor comes to my site with IE, i direct them to download a standards compliant browser. If everybody does this, everyone will stop using IE altogether. Man, how nice would it be to never have to worry about IE support. Wishful thinking? Not if we all work together.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
From what I see in the graph above IE9 will be much faster than previous versions but it will still be the slowest browser. How can it be possible? Good news are the fact that at least this new release intends to be more compatible and standard respectful which seems to be a good decision as web browsers are increasing in numbers and getting better every day. Anyway, from now I'm not considering to switch to IE9 but keep my Chrome or Firefox web browsers, which are great!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
lepe: You need to read more carefully. Not only are the numbers you cited a decade out of date, they're also quite imprecise. The figure you cited for IE in the 1990s includes "marketing costs" which for many companies dwarfs product development costs by a huge amount. Some movies, for instance, cost millions to make and hundreds of millions to promote. As for your skepticism that Opera spends more than IE on development: Who knows? Consider that Opera's entire business is their browser, so they've got no other priorities to direct revenue toward. Further, IE has ~600M more customers than Opera does, so it stands to reason that their support and operations costs are far higher.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
IE 9 provides nothing to web developers...that is unless they code specifically for this 1 browser. Also, where is the mention of platforms this is being developed for? Will this work on Mac/Linux?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
I've been a Microsoft supporter for years - but I am now running FireFox and love it. Sorry MS - your browser stinks in comparison. I'm with pretty much every web developer in the world here - you should be 100% compliant with standards. That would go a long way. We spend all of our time trying to get our sites to work with IE - we just don't have time to mess around with new widgets you build even if we wanted to deploy an IE only site...
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
scott-- You clearly didn't read the post. IE9 better supports standards and it's faster. What web dev doesn't benefit from this? No, IE9 isn't going to run on Mac or Linux; IE5 (~1998) was the last version that ran on those platforms. tony-- You know that Firefox is not "100% compliant" with standards either, right? Shouldn't you be running Opera, which is more compliant than Firefox?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
I don't see why you don't just pick up WebKit or Gecko, put it in your own UI, and contribute to it. Developing the IE engine further is pointless and destructive. We will all continue to curse you daily until you stop.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Dean, I have an idea for you... Why on earth are you making these fixes to IE9. People are still using IE6, 7 and 8 and not everyone will be fully migrated to IE9 for years to come. Why not rollout the rendering engine fixes as updates to the previous browser versions, because seriously you (Microsoft) sure do write some buggy software. That'll make all the web developers in the world happy. IE7 should have been a fix for IE6, IE8 should then have been a fix for that. You can use a meta tag for switching rendering modes just like you did in IE8. Quit releasing new versions until you can render a webpage properly and on par with browsers that actually support standards.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
If you guys won't be supporting Canvas and WebGL, then how about supporting "WebGDI+" and "WebDirectX" :-)
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Switch back to the IE6 interface and I'll switch to IE9 tomorrow.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Permitanme que me ria y me carcajie, jajajajajajajajajajajaja
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@everyone - I'm a web developer. I've worked on enterprise web applications used by some of the largest organizations in the world, and I can tell you that making interfaces work across different browsers is not that difficult. If you know what you're doing, cross-browser compatibility is a TRIVIAL part of the software engineering process. If you think making websites work across browsers is "difficult", then honestly you should find another profession - you'll never be any good as a web developer.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Why I am away from IE7+ is simply because its Favorites pane becomes unresponsive to mouse scrolling when the page starts loading. Developers are important but end-users are awaiting simplicity.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@Will LOL, you speak about how easy it to code for multiple browsers. If we knew what we were doing, it would be a simple task. This is kinda funny, but if we all built sites that look like the one you've provided, the internet would be a very sad place. Yes Will ,im sure all browsers will render your page the same. Oh, and what a great leap you've taken in your html5 DTD. HAHAHAHA
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Same here: svg, canvas and html5 please
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
XHTML with XML MIME type, please? XSLT 2.0, XForms 1.1, SVG 1.2 Tiny at least?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Why is everyone saying that they should adopt WebKit? What's wrong with Gecko? Also, I'm glad that Microsoft are now willingly supporting standards. Rather than complaining, why don't we all actually give them time to catch up. Although I would like to see XHTML support.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
The best technical decision is to adopt webkit.
The best business decision is to adopt webkit.
The best marketing decision is to adopt webkit.
The best decision for the web its users would be to you adopt webkit. Would you adopt webkit pretty please?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@Greg, You're deflecting. Don't tell us to criticize the W3C for Microsoft's problems when Microsoft is a member of the W3C and co-chairs the HTML5 group. They wrote and signed off on the standards like all browser vendors do. And you say open source is not a solution because no one maintains that but Google, IBM, ATT and countless other large companies have heavily contribute to open source projects for years. The claim that open source is two guys in a basement doesn't hold water.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
I hate the negativity in a lot of the comments here. Why are some people taking what has been posted as all that will be in IE9? Yes IE still looks to be behind, but at least its moving forward (as slow as it seems to be). This blog tells me that Microsoft knows there are problems and are doing something about them.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
So if there's an IE9, then there are 4 IE browsers to worry about? I think IE could become significantly more meaningful if the Microsoft browser deployment model had some SERIOUS RE-TOOLING. That's your biggest problem.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Please make IE9 way more standards compliant. I'm really tired of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome all showing things okay but IE having constant issues (even IE8). It's a daily battle around here.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Just base IE9 on WebKit or Gecko so we can stop having all the darn standards issues.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
How about a simple fix such as background colours for Fieldsets working correctly?
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
The comment section is far more valuable than the article itself. From personal experience. I found an issue with Chrome, I logged a bug for it and it was fixed and rolled out in 2 months. I logged a bug about IE8 regarding it's incorrect rounding of font sizes (which is a problem for maintaining vertical rhythm) and was told they won't fix it, but they will look into it when HTML5 is complete. Seems like open source is far more reliable.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Thanks for your intriguing and interesting article; as described, IE9 looks to be a significant milestone for the MS browser. Echoing others' comments, I too hope that it will be compatible with XP, and also decrease load time. A smaller footprint would also be desirable, as well as the ability to selectively suspend script at particular sites. All the best.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@Greg Surely a web browser on a computer should maintain the highest "Compatibility Level". I can agree that a phone should be allowed to support a different level of the specification... but that's because the device has limitations. There's no excuse on a home computer. Microsoft has enough time and money to build a new browser. Honestly, I think a lot of developers would agree that they should take as much time as they need.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Again, this is absurd. From a product standpoint, I think IE will continue to loose browser share and generate the ire of developers until it rehauls its browser update methods. IE 5, 6 and 7 must be eliminated with automatic updates. This should be a non-negotiable for any company serious about competing in the browser market.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Regarding the suggestions to the IE Team about replacing Trident, i believe that the better decision is go with Gecko, it is a mature engine and is becoming faster , faster and faster.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Just to add to my previous comment... In that way, browsers will focus to improve usability, and engines to improve display features. I think it is not an impossible thing to do...
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
It looks great.Hope it can be installed on XP.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
..webkit? - whats not to like! ..it actually work properly for a start! continuing develop IE is just to demonstrate what bad programmmers achieve with unlimited time and unlimited resources!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
So, IE9 is going to have: 1. css3 selectors (= less elements/classes) 2. rounded corners 3. fast javascript (= animations) 4. gpu acceleration (= animations) 5. better font rendering (= text animations) Guys, this is great news! Best news in years! Very pleased to hear this, and can’t wait to see the new browser released. If this pace of changes continues, I might stop recommending Firefox to my Windows-using friends. It won’t be a necessity anymore. Also, keep pushing people to upgrade from IE6. In upgrade alerts, emphasize “better security”. This is the only thing that will make “conservative” people upgrade. Example: “Hello! There are some fundamental problems with the security of your browser. Please upgrade to the latest version to keep yourself safe from hacking. It’s free, there will be no activation nagging at all, and it’s super-easy to do. You can do it yourself right now. Here’s how: …” I don’t know about Microsoft in general, but the Internet Explorer Team has definitely become more open, honest and upfront about the issues, and, most importantly, relevant technology-wise. Please keep up this positive direction!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Please introduce an official way to run multiple IE versions (IE7, IE8, IE9) side-by-side while preserving the authentic behavior of each version. Current third-party solution (MultipleIE) does not give 100% authentic results, which makes people set up VMs (if they are on Windows) or set up multiple VMs instead of just one (if they are on Mac/Linux). Also, vote up for the W3C-style event handlers, and I’d also like to see font-weight/font-style properties supported inside @font-face. Thanks!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
To all those who want IE to support the video tag : really, do you want another browser supporting the video tag with the... umm... WMV format? It's already bad enough for Apple to support H264 and Firefox Theora. So you guys want Microsoft to go in with WMV or something? No more browser should even try to support the video tag, until Apple and Mozilla make up their mind on which codec is going to be the standard. Geez.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
@Chris "What a stupid post. Back in the days of Netscape, IE was actually innovative." What a stupid post, back in the days of Netscape, IE invented ActiveX and VBScript. So now you are saying those are good things? So you want people to be innovative to invent more things like ActiveX? LOL.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
With Internet Explorer 9 you're patching an obsolete software (IE8 < IE7 < IE6 < IE5...). We need a fast navigator written from scratch, and not a 1995 navigator with some changes. Download Google Chrome. www.google.com/chrome
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Please don't make bad design decisions like providing your own Direct2D/Write libraries.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Do some of you hear what you are saying? You are so lazy that you would force end users and businesses to update their software because it's to much of a pain to code for older software. It's not about you! It's about the end user who paid money for software that they like and do not want to upgrade. Most people are more than happy with IE6,7,8 and will be happy with IE 9 as well. I have a question for all you lazy sacks. What happens when Goggle pulls the funding of FireFox in the next couple of years and they go out of business?...ie NetScape. We have been here before my friends either man up or find a new job.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Compliance, smooth rendering and rounded borders are all great, but the name of the game is SPEED. Firefox, Safari and Chrome run circles around IE8 for page rendering, and I am hoping you'll find a way to meet or beat their marks. Looking forward to a BETA release.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
Please, in the name of the WORLD, give up developing IE once an for ALL!!!!
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 19, 2009
If IE9 doesn't support SVG, which has been a solidified W3C recommendation/standard since 2003, I won't support IE9.
Anonymous
November 19, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
@Cal Truly, I care very deeply about text quality; however, I could live with jaggies (really and truly live with them) if IE9 team said, you know what, web standards (particularly: layout and advanced css selectors) are more important right at this time than the rendering of large scale fonts... (And frankly, I find cleartype a misnomer -- should be called smear- or blur- type).
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Will canvas finally be implemented? Why Microsoft always take the hard and slower path...
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
and no mention of xhmtl (i.e. html served as xml, not tag soup) either - xhtml 1.0 has been about for a decade, xhtml 1.1 for years and html 5 will support xml serialisation too. Finally on ie, too? PLEASE?
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
@ Michael Butler, "If IE9 doesn't support SVG, which has been a solidified W3C recommendation/standard since 2003, I won't support IE9." Since no browser out there can really support the W3C SVG standards yet, I guess you won't support any browser out there anyway.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
I would like to see a built in download manager so i can pause my downloads and continue later just like Firefox or Chrome
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
@prediction time (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx#9924988) Excellent post. I'd back that - have you placed bets? @trian (#9925001) If you'd actually researched what you're talking about, you'd realise Opera is the FIRST and ONLY browser to support the border-radius (as opposed to vendor-specific variations) and it's already released (and hardware accelerated) in their mobile browser. @Ian Muir "For anybody who actually builds web sites for a living, this is great news." I build websites for a living - this is not great news. This is no more good news than png support in IE7 or IE8 passing ACID2. Painfully slow advances that are far too little too late and represent the same old business as usual laziness and unwillingness to meet the needs of developers - how that's good news is beyond me. "Better CSS3 support will have far greater impact than Canvas or SVG support" The greatest impact is defined by what is practical to develop - which is dependent on what clients support. If all clients supported SVG and canvas, the whole web would be running on them and they'd be as relevant, or more relevant than CSS3 - in fact, we actually wouldn't need a lot of CSS3. @letseatlunch "by the time this released all the other browsers will have this AND BETTER" All the other browsers ALREADY have this and better. @Joel Coehoorn "I'm most curious to know what version of javascript will be supported: AFAIK, IE8 is still using 1.5" IE doesn't use any version of Javascript - Javascript is a proprietary Mozilla technology. They have produced an ECMA-262 version 5 test-suite though if that's of any relevance. @MSMS "From a profit-motive standpoint, I don't really understand Microsoft continuing to develop Internet Explorer (at least on Trident). It makes Microsoft look clumsy to developers ( i.e. the people you might want to write software for your system ), and it tarnishes Microsoft's brand in general." Excellent point. An answer to this baffling question would be nice. @Mitch "OMG, what's the aggregate noun for "webtards?" Software development is hard." You might have a point, if you weren't talking about a massive multi-billion dollar corporation who's way behind competitors with tiny resources and budgets (or none at all). If development is that hard - how is the iCab browser (developed by one person) so far ahead of IE? @Paul Huizer "A lot of people seem to 'hate' (?) MSFT and find it necessary to bash on msft on each and every corner of the web, I think that is outrageous! If you don't like microsoft, go and visit some other websites" It would be great if developers had that luxury - instead we are forced to support IE. @developer2 "IE is standard compliant already. With CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0. Are there really scenarios where you need CSS 3 features?" It does not fully support CSS2.1 (as claimed), it has NEVER had ANY SUPPORT for xhtml whatsoever in any way, shape or form, and I assume you are most certainly not a developer if you don't even realise that practically every new webpage being developed today is ALREADY making ample use of CSS3. @K. B. McHugh "Firefox is NOT golden; its quirks and its failings are just different. And there are just as many of them; arguably more." Firefox is certainly one of (if not the) worst "modern" (read non-IE) browsers when it comes to standards support - but seriously, claiming that it is anywhere near as hard to develop for as IE is just laughable.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
I don't get why MS is bothering rebuilding Trident for IE9. They should just adopt Webkit or Gecko and move on. What a waste of resources. How many engineer salaries do they have on the Trident team, who are basically just reinventing the wheel, with no perceivable ROI?
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
This is a good start...but clearly there is a lot still to be done. I just hope that IE9 has a shorter dev cycle and that fixes for bugs will also be pushed to lower versions... Can we have a more frequent update on the feature list/support enhancements? All those asking webkit to be used -its the same when IE was almost the only browser in the market...let there be competition.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Let me tell you Microsoft IE team that if you do a half-baked IE9 on XP minus Direct2D and DirectWrite, I in spite of being a loyal IE user when everyone switched to Firefox will abandon IE and switch. I need full IE9 support complete with all technologies on Windows XP. Can't miss out on hardware accelerated because MS only put it in the latest OS. Other browser vendors will definitely put hardware acceleration on XP via OpenGL. The marketshare is yours to lose if you don't support IE9 equally on Windows XP SP3.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Google uses Webkit, Apple uses Webkit. Webkit is the future! Why can't you accept it?
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Does anybody actually still use IE? I mean, voluntarily (enterprise deployments don't count)? I stopped using it when Firefox came out.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
I am thoroughly impressed with what has come of IE9 so far. To be honest, I tend to shy away from IE, and use more substantive browsers like Firefox for plugin support, and Chrome for speed. If IE could introduce an open plugin support, I would be happy to move back to IE. Im noticing lately that Firefox and Chrome have some memory issues that IE8 doesnt seem to have. Anywho, good work guys!
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
haha- I'm flipping through other comments and it seems like use Webkit is a common theme. I'm not sure why you don't- if you really want to please developers that'd be a HUGE jump. Otherwise I'm not sure why IE is still closed source. It seems like you've got nothing to lose and the world to gain by opening 'er up. Anyway I applaud your pursuit of standards, even if progress is slow.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Big tip: When released, make it an optional update, not important: and do develop the IE8/Trident engine removal tool for Windows 7, please.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
+10^∞ for WebKit adoption. I still dont understand why you have to be so bullheaded and "roll your own" for the rendering engine. Or why you focus on creating "solutions" for tertiary problems when you havent solved core problems/implementations of things other browsers are covering.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
It would be very nice to see faster CSS pseudoclass :hover rendering (for example, when background color changes on hovering element). In IE8, this is tremendously slow and very unusable (especially when many links are side by side on the page) unlike any other browser. Compare hover rendering speed in IE8 with that in Firefox and you will see what I mean. Thanks.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Boy, it looks like we got a WebKit zealot group with so many requests to adopt webkit. Just ignore them. Trident can and will be better than the other engines.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
My comments seem to have dropped off - all I asked for was xmhtl - was that so bad that I should get censored?????
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
@Paul, you'll find your original comment among the hundreds of other comments above. Only comments that violate the rules are dropped. (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/07/22/191629.aspx)
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Please keep releasing new IE versions every 6-12 months so developers/dev companies that dont create for IE go out of business trying to put exceptions for each version ty. For consumers and most sites javascript performance ( kind of anoying its the bench mark) is not relevant anyway with direct drawing performance and quality for the render can be significantly improved more than offsetting javascript for most sites.
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Same story... Microsoft viewing themselves as pioneers in the PC world when in reality they are thieves in business ideas and financial gain
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
HAD TO RT THE LAST COMMENT - ITS SPOT ON !!

re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

Friday, November 20, 2009 11:25 PM by scsi Same story... Microsoft viewing themselves as pioneers in the PC world when in reality they are thieves in business ideas and financial gain

Anonymous
November 20, 2009
Firstly, I hope that the 32/100 score is going to improve. From a web developers point of view, standards ARE everything, and if you want to stop developers categorising browsers into "Internet Explorer" and "Proper browsers", you need to pay attention to that. Secondly, PLEASE add SVG support to IE. By ignoring SVG you're holding back the whole web - unilateral SVG support could change the face of web design, and IE is the only missing link!
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
I think you guys should release these javascript engine improvements as IE 8.4/8.5 so that it will give a message to community that MS is really working hard to catch up with other browsers in terms of js improvemnts/standard compliance and it will also help in retaining the market share of IE. Thanks, Anuj
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
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Anonymous
November 20, 2009
@ieloyal: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx#9926412 +1000
Anonymous
November 20, 2009
So we can have a monoculture? http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/09/mozilla-committed-to-gecko.ars/2
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Really? Having three browsers in circulation isn't enough? Have Microsoft completely lost the plot? You do realize that a huge percentage of users don't upgrade, so designers and developers are still working to keep sites compatible with IE6. Until that monstrosity, along with IE7 and IE8, are completely eradicated there will be nobody who can use the new features in IE9 as they won't work for the majority of users. I commend your efforts to develop a decent Microsoft browser but you first need to find a way to rid the world of the old ones. Having four Microsoft browsers to develop for will be the final straw for many and if it becomes that way you should expect to see a whole lot of sites that don't support IE at all, instead recommending that users switch to Firefox or another REAL browser and you will be out of a job.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
My friend told me I should upgrade to Windows 7, and I was like, dude, your sooooo clueless, I'm already on Windows 98.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
So, I have this awesome branding idea for you guys. You should call IE9 "Web 2.0". You know, like, it's the internet only newer.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
So, like, there's this thing on my computer called 'My Computer', and I was wondering, like, when my computer crashes, which is, like, all the time, is it my computer crashing, or is it 'My Computer' crashing. Ya know?
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Oh and spell checkers for IE downloadable from MS rather than scratching around for stuff from 3rd parties. That is a necessity - we're living in the world of the Internet forum, the blog, the wiki - that really ought to be another 8.1 feature....
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Since it seems like IE isn't going to get with the HTML5 program for the next decade, if ever, I think I'm going to start requiring ChromeFrame. I really cannot be bothered supporting this bucket of bolts any longer. Life's too short to lose years of it supporting IE.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Just a note to the "developers" who seem to take this personally: maintaining your weblog no one reads does not make you a developer. If you don't want to debug for multiple versions of market leading software then just debug for whatever browser you use - because you're the only one who cares.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
On the subject of Javascript, DOMContentLoaded would be a very welcome improvement... You lads have your work cut out if you're going to make me happy! But I know you'll do it. ;-) Thanks!
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Why is it that the most powerful software company in the world struggles so much to make a quality web browser and firewall? The computer science guys I knew in college were super smart. Does something happen when MS hires them?
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Add: -CSS 3.1 -Download manager -Integrate multiple windows into tabs in IE and viceversa. Stack and unstack tabs. -Faster webpage browisng
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Good developments here, keep up the good work. In my view the major missing feature of IE7 is color managment. The tech media doesn't give that much attention but to my mind without it, every web page is rendered incorrectly. SVG support is also important, it would be great and overdue for IE to support this.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
@Petooge: Nice point on SVG and Canvas support. While MS trying to push silverlight they will never ever support any open technologies that are competitors to their product. WHY don't you make a webkit based default browser and leave IE8 there as an option for companies and users who needs this for their older web apps?
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
I see that there is a lot of rage from the web designer/developer community, and I can relate. I have spent so many hours of my life "breaking" and "hacking" my well formed standards compliant html, css, and JS to work in IE. I guess I am tired. tired of continually trying to fix problems that I don't understand why they exist in the first place. Tired of testing my website in all the non-MS browsers, having it work, then opening up IE 6, then 7, then 8, and having to find new ways to fix new problems in all three. Problems that just don't exist in any other browsers. I am tired of having to find tricky ways to debug my javascript in IE. I am all for new web browsers. All for new technologies, all for making software better. Good job to you guys for trying to make a better browser. I am sure the issues on your end are far more complicated then I can understand or care too. I hope one day I can love IE and sing it's praises. But right now, all IE does (any version) is make my life harder for no reason. And I hate it. Best of luck.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
@ trian > So I guess Opera is now the one > behind, since Opera still doesn't > support corner-radius (and no word > on when it will be supported) Opera (Presto 2.3 engine) supports CSS 3 border-radius: www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto23/#css regards, Gérard
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
I'm tired of IE, regardless of the version. IE6 has to completely disappear from the face of the earth and IE has to allow add ons like Firefox does. I do recommend Firefox to my clients because it works the way that I expect. Adopt a standard (because we have to,) and then impress me by being W3C compliant across the board.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
@ Dean Hachamovitch > With IE8, we delivered a highly- > interoperable implementation of CSS > 2.1 and contributed over 7,200 > tests to the W3C. Out of 47 tests I submitted to the W3C CSS test suite, IE8 fails 36 of them. How is that IE9 build doing on those 47 tests? There is now also a bunch of other (public, accessible) CSS 2.1 tests that IE 8 fails. All coming from web developers. How is that IE9 build doing on those tests? > Standards that do not include > validation tests are much more > difficult to implement > consistently, and more difficult > for site developers to rely on. Fair enough. How well is that IE9 build doing on these public accessible DOM tests (DOM 1 Core, DOM 2 Core, DOM 2 HTML)? www.w3.org/DOM/Test/#releases Gérard Talbot
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
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Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Just wanted to add my voice to the people calling on Microsoft to stop work on Trident and just adopt WebKit. Let's focus on the future of the internet, not technology 5+ years old.
Anonymous
November 21, 2009
Many of these posts here are evidence of the immaturity that represents the market user-agent developers must contend with during product developement. This is unfortunate as technology innovation must be sacrificed at the developement layer in favor of marketing considerations that may potentially hinder technology developement innovation. This is a cyclical problem that if not proactive and forcefully corrected by user-agent vendors may significantly slow and reduce innovation of the web as an application layer in the future. If IE9 were to make a solid stance to not support HTML5 and/or CSS3 I would be extremely proud of their market leadership. HTML5 and CSS3 are not standards. Premature adoption will severely handicap efforts to make any necessary radical correction to the concerned standards specifications. The inability to make corrections to known technology flaws from standards introduced to the market takes years to remove in favor of the intended processing where a correction to a standard that has not entered the market requires virtually no cost or effort. This is another indication of immature interests driving conditions they may be counter-productive to technology interests. Unfortunately, if the degree of immaturity continues to dominate user-agent developement as a business on the web and where technology innovation occurs, such as at the standards layer versus the developement layer, it seems innovation is being progressively terminated. Such conditions are unfortunate, because the effects will not be immediately apparent and when they become apparent it will be too late. I am a fan of IE and with each new release significant improvements are made. I have only two requests:

that IE9 support application mime types.
that IE9 allow a user to select an option to support strict processing of markup only. While IE8 focused strongly advancing support and conformance for CSS2 processing my request is for markup processing. Watching the browser to optionally fail on a markup error, such as the processing of XML, will help developers know where errors occur in their markup code. No other browser supports such a method of testing. If IE9 were to support such a feature it would become my primary browser of choice as a developer. In closing I want to say good job on the hard work and I look forward to the first beta release.

Anonymous
November 21, 2009
For the love of Pete, please put color management into IE9! My customers and I use Firefox strictly because of this. Ever hear of photography? I dislike having to load 2 browsers. Make IE9 complete and this won't be necessary.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
I would like to see a faster startup time on IE and a faster browsing time and loading up of webpages despite of any plugins or toolbars etc being loaded into it!
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
@may: You can report unsafe sites using the Tools / SmartScreen Filter / Report Unsafe Site option. I have reported this site and the download that it links to. Thanks!
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
One thing I think would be a nice trick would be to have the ability to use tabs like workbooks in excel. Being able to have multiple tabpanes in the same client area would be helpful. Also, a built in utility or bho to automatically scroll any web page could be useful; I know there are javascripts out there that automatically do that, but, I would like that feature from the browser, not a script.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
@ Dean Hachamovitch > Standards Progress. Our focus is > providing rich capabilities – the > ones that most developers want to > use – in an interoperable way. Your IE blog post: 192 errors Verify for yourself here: validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx">http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx Your IE blog site: 1132 errors Verify for yourself here: validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/ Your Microsoft Engineering Windows 7 site: 1809 errors Verify for yourself here: validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/default.aspx Every single MSDN webpage has about 100 validation markup errors, does not use a strict DTD, even has numerous validation errors in the code examples from which ordinary web authors are supposed to learn from. Microsoft has to comply with its own commitments to web standards. Microsoft should lead by showing the example, should promote proper authoring and coding practices in websites under its control. There is no reason as to why all of microsoft-controlled websites have failed so bad at validation (markup and CSS code) in the last 11 years and this is still going on. Gérard Talbot
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
isn't it better if the web browser would use both the cpu and the gpu? also , use as many cores as possible?
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
So in IE8 we had 3 rendering options: 1.) Quirks Mode (~IE5) 2.) Standards Mode (~IE7) 3.) IE8 Standards Mode (IE8) so when IE9 is released we now have the problem that was predicted when IE8 was in beta. IE9 will have 4 rendering modes - further ruining the web. 1.) Quirks Mode (~IE5) 2.) Standards Mode (~IE7) 3.) IE8 Standards Mode (IE8) 4.) IE9 Standards Mode (IE9) As a web developer I have NO INTEREST whatsoever in maintaining sites across all 4 of the above. Especially since I don't have to mess with any of this in other browsers (they are the equivalent of IE10 in terms of standards support) Please specify exactly what the plan is for all of this. I'd hate to have to resort to more sill HTTP headers and Meta Tags just because IE can't keep up. In addition, since all my sites now support the excellent Google Frame plugin - please indicate that continued support for this plugin and others will be maintained in IE9.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
I honestly thought this was some kind of April Fools joke when I read this post. But alas it's real and quite frankly I'm insulted and bitterly dissapointed.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
OK: You are coming around with features, that other browesers support since ages. Might be a Stept forward. But it is not enough to launch another IE. You have to find strategies to get rid of the old rubish IE6 and IE7. It's bad enough to torcher the web with yet another half baked something. But having 4 of them flying around basically broke the web.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
Gérard: Google.com has: 39 Errors, 2 warning(s) gmail.com: 59 Errors, 42 warning(s) Validation links are grossly overrated, and usually don't have any meaningful implications.
Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
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Anonymous
November 22, 2009
Next IE version will utilize Direct2D and DirectWrite to accelerate rendering. Great but don't know when will it be released, even alpha version release date is not available. And now there is a firefox testing version that using the same DirectX technology at http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2009/11/22/direct2d-hardware-rendering-a-browser for developers testing and tuning performance. According to previous version's release schedule, it seems Mozilla may released an accelerated browser before Microsoft. At least they have a version can be downloaded by user and developer, and this version can be installed with their current browser without needing a VM. This means even a third party developer can utilize Microsoft technology before you (Microsoft developers). Dear IE developers, at this speed you failed to catch up, should you hurry up or give up?
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
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Anonymous
November 23, 2009
@"yet another developer": You are living in an echo chamber and you don't even realize it. Before you cite the W3Schools site, you should probably read it first. Here's a direct quote: "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers. These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users."
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
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Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Eu quero e meus amigos aqui no Brasil também!!! :D
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Microsoft, please adopt Gecko/Webkit, your latest is still worst-in-class.
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Hopefully you will have MJPEG support in IE 9. IE is the only major browser that current does not support this. Many IP cameras use this. As a developer it very frustrating having to create custom plugins for IE just to support MJPEG.
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
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Anonymous
November 23, 2009
I like how people are whining about IE9 only scoring 32/100 on Acid3, which is already higher than IE8, despite the fact that it's barely in its alpha stage. Amusing.
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Adopt WebKit Stop messing up with the web and adopt WebKit: Firefox/Safari/Chromium are being hardware accelerated for some time now (cairographics.org), welcome to the past. Adopt WebKit
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Congratulations guys!!!!! This is awesome! I cannot wait to get my hands on IE9 - very, very glad to see IE back in the innovation game. I have not felt this way since IE 5.5, which killed competing browsers with its innovations.
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Why dont Microsoft just buy Mozilla and rebrand firefox as Internet Explorer 10
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
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Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Everyone seems to have a lot of negative things to say about IE9. I have to admit, since IE7 and on, my time developing for multiple platforms has gotten significantly easier. IE7 and 8 work pretty much the same way. I'll bet that styling for IE9 will be the same as well. With that assumption I can do the following:  That way I'm styling for IE7 and everything above it. I also read in some comments about people wanting HTML 5. Start using it! Just throw this in the top of a JavaScript document: // I'm using jQuery for this example: $.each(['header','footer','nav','section'],function(){ document.createElement(this); }); I'm only using a few HTML 5 tags in the code example, but you should get the idea. Get started building!
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
Are we going to get MathML support? PLEASE!! No more plugins for xml.
Anonymous
November 23, 2009
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Anonymous
November 24, 2009
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Anonymous
November 24, 2009
Please stop asking the IE team to go Webkit. Gecko is definitely the way to go. Just my 2 cents.
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
MS update has just pushed through a fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973688 Very interesting - correcting msxml doctype handling to support xhmtl... Can it be true - or is IE finally going to support application/xhtml+xml ??? I must be dreaming, but such a nice dream. Tell me it's true! Probably not, the problem happens anyway when using xml with xsl, but I can keep dreaming nevertheless!
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
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Anonymous
November 24, 2009
You have lost us to Google's Chrome already due to speed! When I reboot our machine, I am up and running with several sessoins of Chrome for at least 2 minutes before the IE 8 session hits our home page!! Is IE9 going to fix this!? I doubt it.
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
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Anonymous
November 24, 2009
Multi-column support please please please! column-count: 3; column-gap: 1em; column-rule: 1px solid black; It's more urgent than anything else! Average screen width is far above 1600 pixels now. The 1280 is the low-end nowadays. The available layouts are about to become totally unreadable. Please MAKE IE9 SUPPORT MULTI-COLUMN! Really. Seriously :)
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
I honestly don't see how a publicly-traded company bothers spending time, resources, and, most of all, money, on a free browser. I mean, MS has never gotten IE right, and one cannot assume they will start anytime soon. But, while you are it, please, please, please make the browser's interface totally customizable. See Firefox if you want an example of how to provide options on layouts.
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
So how about you guys start earning your crust and implement webGL! When online gaming in browsers begin your numbers will dwindle. Don't miss this trick like you miss every other spoon-fed idea.
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
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Anonymous
November 24, 2009
I'm glad that IE9 is at the door, but i'm dissapointed that Windows 7 is already out and it wasn't supported with the new browser. Meanwhile Mozilla introduced new version for W7 which will be in use in about months.
Anonymous
November 24, 2009
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Anonymous
November 25, 2009
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Anonymous
November 25, 2009
So wait; let's get things straight:

people are requesting Microsoft to implement DRAFT specifications in IE9.
the same people are blaming Microsoft for adding DRAFT specifications to IE6, which later got changed in the final spec resulting in the non-standards mess we are in now! Hello wake up and smell the real world! Here's a riddle for you all: what if in a year some DRAFT HTML5 stuff that is already implemented in browsers and used by webdevelopers changes? Are you going to shoot down Firefox or Chrome or whatever for their non-standards (gasp proprietary) implementations ? Great work IE guys, IE9 is looking great. Only one thing: get it out ASAP!

Anonymous
November 25, 2009
I say keep Direvt2d and Directwrite, but use them to power the standards IE has yet to support (like canvas) that way, the graphical horsepower could actually help the performance so IE could boast more. why try to make your own standard when you could just use windows to super power existing ones, and make your browser look better in the process.
Anonymous
November 25, 2009
"people are requesting Microsoft to implement DRAFT specifications in IE9" Uh? They implemented HTML when it was a draft, didn't they? And SVG is a recommendation since January 2003, but where is it in IE? It doesn't matter if it draft or not, IE just made the web walk in circles for a while. Time to move forward. Oh, btw: "IE is Being Mean to Me". A funny music, listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTzwJsHpU8
Anonymous
November 25, 2009
Oh no! I'm searching on fixes for IE's problems, I stumble here and now realize that in coming months I will have to... quadruple my workload. This ain't fair.
Anonymous
November 25, 2009
Never would have believed that there were still so many worthwhile reasons to upgrade! Keep up the good work guys
Anonymous
November 26, 2009
I am writing to encourage the IE9 developers to go out have some coffee, take a long lunch. Then come back to the office and play some Xbox. The longer it takes for IE9 to be released the less time I lose having the deal with ANOTHER second-rate browser. Okay fine, IE6 was ahead of its time when it came out. But my point stands. 25% of web development time is lost due to cross-browser issues. Do you really want to make it worse than it already is?
Anonymous
November 26, 2009
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Anonymous
November 26, 2009
as in IE user, all I want to say is: I hope IE doesn't go down the same path as Opera. Opera used to lag behind, for any type of browsability (such as it took time for Opera guys to update their browser before latest Gmail version could be opened in it) similarly, if i open google wave now in IE8, i need to install google chrome frame to view it properly. I would like IE9 to bring me at least in par with Firefox 3.5 or google chrome, if not better than those so that I don't need anything other than just my browser for viewing any kinda page.
Anonymous
November 26, 2009
Great! Then I shall reduce multi-browsers usage while developing sites. Hope to be way better than IE 8 and more efficient.
Anonymous
November 26, 2009
Count me as a switcher to other browsers with hardware acceleration on XP the moment you stop supporting XP with feature parity.
Anonymous
November 27, 2009
My hopes for IE9:

Support for SVG, APNG and MNG.
Compliance with web standards.
Pass Acid1, Acid2 and Acid3 tests.
Full support/functionality for CSS3.

Anonymous
November 27, 2009
I hate new IE menu (since IE7). Way not the classic menu? All menu items are hidden. When I need to instruct a user by phone how to display the menu items is a BIG sacrifice. Take a look: http://twitpic.com/r8dkg/full
Anonymous
November 27, 2009
Please take care of first things first. Do everything possible to get rid of IE6 and IE7. Then provide browser updates with the same rapidity as Firefox.
Anonymous
November 27, 2009
Google now advertising on Google home page to "Install Google Chrome (A faster way to browse the web)". What would Microsoft advertise? "Don't update to IE7 or IE8 or IE9 because applications you made for IE6 might only work in IE6"?
Anonymous
November 27, 2009
dont worry guys... it wont matter the slightest bit, by the time ie9 is released everyone will be running google chrome frame and we wont need to worry about html5 or proper standard compliance on microsofts end ;)
Anonymous
November 27, 2009
Go IE Team Lets crush Firefo,chrome and opera!

Full CSS 3.1 Support
SVG Support
Download manager
Faster web browsing
Merge multiple windows into tabs featureS or viceversA! gogo

Anonymous
November 27, 2009
I agree on the part of APNG / MNG - and would like to add JPEG2000 too. Most pc' are fast enough these days to decode it and it's about time to get some alternatives to those lossy formats like gif and jpeg.
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
MS just doesn't get it. They're playing catch up in everything important: cloud, smart devices, web (browser). If I was on the board of MS, I would can the whole IE team. IE9 will be irrelevant. Simple question, if a webkit based browser from MS was the default browser, would anyone use Chrome on Windows? This would not only hurt google, others would be powerless to do anything about it. How could you take MS to court for embracing open source technology?
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
Anon, playing catch-up is an intentional strategy. Microsoft has made its fortune on it.
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
@Boo """Just another web log comment.. pay no attention. IE Team: Great job guys. Really. No sarcasm. I applaud the IE Team for focusing (in IE7 and 8) on the USER instead of the designer. While the designers do like to complain long and loud, as a USER of IE I am very happy. It's solid, renders well, and renders fast (even on 5 yr old hardware). Most of my time is spent READING or LOOKING at a web page. From that point of view, a couple milliseconds difference in rendering between IE and the WebKit croud is nigh imperceptable. IE waits for me at the same speed as all other browsers. Again, you are doing a great job. Keep at it! """ You sound a lot like you don't understand anything about designers. The designers want the USERS to have the best browsing experience possible. IE doesn't let them deliver that. IE ignores the designers, it ignores the users. How hard is that to understand?
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
wow!!~ I really looking forwrad to see ie9.!
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
Instead of releasing a new version of IE you should better release a forced "rendering engine update" for IE 6, 7 and 8.
Anonymous
November 28, 2009
This website uses vector technology VML and HTML + TIME sous IE6-7-8-9 demo : http://www.cyberhal.com blog infos : http://nitroblog.mediasites.fr
Anonymous
November 29, 2009
Please stop. For the sake of the millions of hours designers spend working around IE every year, just stop. Use WebKit, or Gecko, just stop these "improvements". Acid3 Test at 32 in 2010? Please, you have to see that you failed!
Anonymous
November 29, 2009
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Anonymous
November 29, 2009
CSS3. Good job with support for rounded corners. Maybe an end of nested divs are over the horizon. Will IE9 support hsla color? Will IE9 support background-size? Background-size will allow for flexible width faux columns.
Anonymous
November 29, 2009
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Anonymous
November 29, 2009
@Alan: The problem is that your CSSClass page is in Quirks mode. Make it a Standards mode page and it looks just fine.
Anonymous
November 30, 2009
I'm convinced that Microsoft Software Engineers (which is a loose title, because engineers are by nature problem SOLVERS, not creators), hate all Web Developers, and the internet, and users, and computers. Dear Microsoft, On behalf of all web designers, please stop making web browsers. Sincerely, -The Internet
Anonymous
November 30, 2009
Dear Tyler, On behalf of all of the Internet, please stop posting silly rants and pretending to speak for a billion people you've never met. Thank you. -The Internet
Anonymous
November 30, 2009
This does not look promising at all. It still seems that you guys are missing the point and that IE will remain to be the 100% standards incompatible browser.
Anonymous
November 30, 2009
Please add SVG support with support for alternate external SVG stylesheets. Also please allow the SVG stylesheets to be overridden (for accessibility). Please add WEB-ARIA support for SVG. Less of a priority, but nice to have: XHTML support.
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
@Victor: 100% Standards Incompatibility would be an impressive achievement. Troll elsewhere.
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
What scares me is when Microsoft starts talking about "the standards that developers care about". This is Microsoft oblique-speak for "we are not planning on being as standards compliant as the other browsers, and we will define our own set of what's important rather than listening to developers" I'm optimistic that the insecure dinosaur that is IE6 will die soon, however.
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
I'm very excited just to see acid3 rendering more correctly; the jump in passing tests is icing on the cake. While acid3 does have some dubious stuff in it, I still think it's important for IE9 to compete along that axis. I'm curious if the JS engine does dynamic recompilation based upon runtime sampling to increase code locality of the JIT'd code. Can anyone answer that question?
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
@Sylvain Galineau [Microsoft]: Let's look at the various W3C specifications used in Acid3: DOM2 Core - Recommendation (2000) DOM2 Events - Recommendation (2000) DOM2 HTML - Recommendation (2003) DOM2 Range - Recommendation (2000) DOM2 Style - Recommendation (2000) DOM2 Traversal - Recommendation (2000) DOM2 Views - Recommendation (2000) HTML4 - Recommendation (1998) HTML4.01 - Recommendation (1999) Media Queries - Candidate Recommendation (Call for Implementation) Selectors - Last Call Working Draft XHTML 1.0 - Recommendation (2000) CSS2 (@font-face) - Recommendation (1998) CSS2.1 - Candidate Recommendation (Call for Implementation) CSS3 Color - Last Call Working Draft (formerly CR) CSS3 UI - Candidate Recommendation (Call for Implementation) SVG 1.1 - Recommendation (2003) SMIL 2.1 - Recommendation (2005) Out of all these standards, only two are below Call for Implementation: Selectors Level 3 and CSS3 Color. Both of these are Last Call, which is the last stage before Call for Implementation. CSS3 Color was a Candidate Recommendation at the time Acid3 was released, but was returned to working draft status several months later. I'll grant you that the newest @font-face work is in the CSS3 Font Working Draft, but since IE already has partial support, and given how long it's been in CSS2, I don't see why we should give Microsoft slack on this, especially since they've failed to implement TrueType font support for entirely political reasons. Given how stable these specifications are, there really isn't an excuse for IE9 scoring 32/100 in Acid3, even in it's current alpha state. Safari 4.0 and Opera 10 already pass. At least Mozilla has the excuse of having XUL and XBL built into the browser engine, and yet Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 scores exactly three times better (96/100). I suspect that if Microsoft can't top 80/100, they're going to be a laughing stock.
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
@matthew: "they've failed to implement TrueType font support for entirely political reasons." Yeah, respect for intellectual property is "political." Any other lies you wish to share with the class? http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/07/21/font-embedding-on-the-web.aspx
Anonymous
December 01, 2009
@Aldo: "Instead of releasing a new version of IE you should better release a forced "rendering engine update" for IE 6, 7 and 8." YES!
Anonymous
December 02, 2009
I say to you the same words Mr. Smith said to Neo: You must know it by now. YOU CAN'T WIN. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? WHY DO YOU PERSIST?
Anonymous
December 02, 2009
Seriously, guys, if you're not going to bother with Acid3, don't bother at all. Developers are sick and tired of having to write one version of their website for standard-compliant browsers - and another, hacked site for IE. Yes, I know the MS mantra is "all Microsoft, all the time". If you guys had your way, we'd all be writing purely for IE, in ASP, running on IIS... but that's the mentality that brought us the dark ages of IE6. If you're going to seriously complete with the actually decent browsers out there, you need to take web standards seriously. Honestly, you'd be better off throwing out Trident all together and adopting Webkit and calling it a day.

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An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

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