HTML5 and Same Markup: Second IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers
When we started planning IE9, we recognized the need for a better feedback loop with developers. The developer community was clear that they wanted pre-release builds of the browser platform in a consistent rhythm, with a good feedback mechanism.
Seven weeks ago at the MIX Conference, we released the first IE9 Platform Preview. We committed to updating the Preview approximately every eight weeks. Today, we’re releasing the second Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now at www.IETestDrive.com.
Today’s release builds on the first Platform Preview, delivering improvements to IE9’s performance, support for standards, and hardware acceleration of HTML5. We’ve also updated the test drive site with a new set of developer samples to show what developers can do with GPU-powered HTML5. As part of our commitment to enabling developers to use the Same Markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – on the web, we have contributed many new tests to the W3C for HTML5, as well as CSS3 Media Queries and DOM. The Developer Tools in this preview include some new features to make finding and fixing markup issues easier.
Developers should expect much more from browsers in order to deliver the graphically rich, interactive applications that HTML5 will enable. In IE9, our goal is to provide professional-grade, modern HTML5 support on top of modern hardware through Windows. The IE9 Platform Preview and the samples at the test drive site show the significant performance gains that web pages enjoy when a browser takes full advantage of the PC’s hardware capabilities through the operating system.
Performance and GPU-Powered HTML5
With the second Platform Preview we continue to improve IE9’s performance and maintain our focus on real-world sites and hardware acceleration. We examined the patterns in use across many websites and frameworks to identify which changes in the browser make actual sites faster. The first chart here, for example, shows how different subsystems contribute to the performance of different real-world sites.
The JavaScript engine is one of several important subsystems. Here’s a chart of IE9 performance on one particular industry benchmark for JavaScript performance, the Webkit Sunspider test:
You’ll notice that the performance difference between IE9 and other browsers on this benchmark is in the range of an eye-blink. As we continue to make IE9’s script engine faster for real world sites, IE will continue to become faster at this particular benchmark as well. To date we’ve done very little specific tuning for Webkit Sunspider. As with most benchmarks, depending on your machine, the differences may vary.
The performance you experience browsing actual websites often has less to do with JavaScript than with other subsystems in the browser. You can see this for yourself by trying the Speed Demos at the test drive site in IE9 and in other browsers. This video shows them in action:
These samples show just some of the advantages of GPU-Powered HTML5, and applying the power of your PC’s hardware to making web browsing faster. What’s particularly exciting is that developers don’t have to rewrite their sites – their current markup (HTML, CSS, and script) just runs faster.
Same Markup
Web browsers should render the same markup – the same HTML, same CSS, and same script –the same way. That’s simply not the case today. Enabling the same markup to work the same across different browsers is as crucial for HTML5’s success as performance.
While some people associate this same markup situation with IE6, it actually applies across browsers in general. Developers typically have to write different markup to get the same desired outcome, even across the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers. You can see some examples in these videos with people on the IE team about DOM, SVG, and CSS3. On the test drive site, you can try the “Border Radius” example in different browsers to see another. There are many examples today of developers trying to use HTML5 features, only to find it works in Safari only, Firefox only, or Chrome but not Safari or Firefox (find ‘doesn't work well on Firefox’ on the page).
We’re engaged with the standards working groups and other browser vendors as part of the web community with Same Markup as a key goal. Same markup is the real-world benefit of standards for developers (and through them, the rest of the web).
True standards bodies are important so that different parties and communities can come together to consensus. Specifications are a good start. Other parts of the technology industry have shown that comprehensive and accurate test suites are essential to provide interoperability for developers and products that work for consumers. They’re how an industry converges on a common understanding of the specifications and can assess its progress.
Enabling an interoperable web so developers can create amazing HTML5 applications is at the core of what “same markup” means. Our investments in standards and interoperability are all about enabling the same markup to just work. When developers spend less time re-writing their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the web. Today, we’re submitting 88 new tests to the W3C bringing our total to 192 tests submitted during IE9. Our focus leading the HTML5 Working Group’s testing task force is on thorough, professional-grade tests that enable developers.
On the test drive site, you can try out several examples of IE9’s improved standards support and interoperability with other browsers. CSS3 Media Query support enables a site to adapt to different display attributes (like width, height, orientation) on the fly.
| Optimized for Large Display | Optimized for Netbook | Optimized for Mobile | |
Another sample on the test drive site shows how developers can use DOMContentLoaded to deliver better performance with web pages that respond to the user as soon as the page is done parsing, instead of waiting for when everything on the page has loaded.
CSS3 Media Queries and DOMContentLoaded are examples of requests from the community that are now in the product. Many other features you’ve requested – DOM Traversal and Range, getElementsByClassName, createDocument, and more – are available today in the IE9 platform. The Preview also fixes many issues that users have reported with our SVG, JavaScript, and CSS3 implementations.
Some people use Acid3 as a shorthand for standards. Acid3 tests about 100 details of a dozen different technologies. Some are still in “under construction.” Some of the patterns, like SMIL animations, are inconsistent with other parts of HTML5, like CSS3 animations, and need to be reconciled. Here’s a screenshot of how today’s IE9 Platform Preview runs today’s Acid3 test:
As IE runs more of the “same markup” that developers actually use on the web, our Acid3 score will continue to go up. This approach is a partial test of some capabilities, and is quite different from a test suite. For contrast, you can run some of the tests we’ve submitted to the W3C here in any browser.
The Developer Tools in IE9 Platform Preview 2 include new features. The Console window is now a full tab that includes diagnostic information from IE. Developers can use the “Change User Agent String” menu item to experiment with sending different that UA strings to sites with every request, selecting from preset strings or creating their own custom string. This complements another feature we’ve included – the new IE9 UA string.
Since releasing the first Platform Preview, we’ve answered a lot of developer questions. Here’s a recent one from a GMail engineer:
Sometimes we have to do browser detection, and we tend to group all IEs together, with the occasional branch based on version. Should we treat IE9 entirely differently? Is it intended to behave closer to webkit/gecko than IE7/8?
Our answer is an emphatic YES. IE9’s standards support makes it much closer, for developers, to Gecko, Presto, and the different versions of Webkit than it is to IE7. We want to make the same markup work across browsers, and want feedback from developers about the issues they find offering the same markup to IE9. To this end, we’ve shared some suggestions in this blog post on Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code and will blog about additional examples and patterns.
We recently wrote about HTML5 video and codecs. HTML5 Video tag support will come in Platform Preview 3. We want to focus with the community on the underlying and enabling technologies, like CSS and DOM, first, so that the same markup really does work across sites.
Test Drive It Today
We’re eager for developer feedback, and hope you have as much fun test driving IE9 as we continue to have in building it. We appreciate your support and interest in IE and will continue to pay close attention to all the feedback on Connect. We’ll continue the rhythm of IE9 Platform Preview updates approximately every eight weeks, as well as our work at the standards bodies with other browser vendors and the community. Your feedback about how IE9 handles the same markup your sites give other browsers, and the standards tests we’ve submitted to the W3C, makes a huge difference.
Many people have asked about the beta and the full browsing experience. We want the beta to build on a solid platform of performance, same markup, and GPU-Powered HTML5. Our focus now is building that solid platform.
A few last details: the Platform Preview continues to be the thinnest possible wrapper around the web platform, and as such is not intended for general purpose browsing. It does not have IE8’s security protections (like Protected Mode, SmartScreen filter, and the Cross-site scripting filter) which we strongly recommend for anyone browsing the web today.
The platform preview installs side by side with Internet Explorer 8 so that you can try it without replacing the full IE that comes with Windows. This second release of the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview will install over the first version. There is no need to uninstall the first Preview before installing second. You’ll also find more information on what’s included in this release of the Platform Preview in the Release Notes, including known and resolved issues.
Thanks –
Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer
Edit 2:20pm – updating links to the standalone versions of the embedded video.
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
mind blocking affects,usage and many more with HTML5 thanQ u for the fast release...Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
I would test this however... 1.) It's not available on Windows XP. Anyone with half a functioning brain knows you guys can get this to work without the GPU functionality...heck we know you guys could get the GPU functionality to work in XP. 2.) My upgrade edition of Vista (which hogs up a full GB in VirtualBox) expired and won't ask me for a previous Windows CD and/or key for a previous version of Windows. I refuse to use it or buy Windows 7 as they SEVERELY impair my ability to work efficiently. Guess I'll test this out when I have extra time to uh, reinstall Vista, reinstall Vista SP1, reinstall Vista SP2, reinstall that Direct2D patch, etc etc. Let's see, when I did this before the first developer preview it took me about ten hours, great! All this added to the fact that you guys are only supporting a proprietary video codec for HTML5 while you've made it clear that you're covering the widest range of actual standards? Yeah, my enthusiasm has really been shot. Don't get me wrong, keep up the great work adding actual standards! Though as excited as I am to see IE become standards compliant I am so beyond having my time wasted especially after having yesterday entirely blown by an incompetent web host who can't even have PHP sessions saved to a file among other idiocies. Time is worth money and I'm not sitting on an empire of money where the sun never sets. Again congratulations (and I mean that) though you guys keep boxing yourselves in so much that you're negating all the positive vibes you should be getting.Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
<a href="http://www.definately.org">definately</a>Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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January 01, 2003
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May 05, 2010
XP support? Chrome 5.0 Beta runs on XP. Chrome 6 is even planning to add hardware acceleration. If they use a cross platform technology like OpenGL then IE9 will once again end up not supporting XP for no reason.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Please allow us to crop out the left and right edges from web pages when viewing or printing. This is a problem when you view on a small device or print to a PDF or paper copy. Many web sites do not render well when output that way with the left hand navigation table or right hand advertisements panel being printed before or after the main page content.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Love the H/A demo. Obviously, it blows all other browsers out of the water except for Opera; which achieves similar results w/o H/A.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Hi, any chance of an OS X version? It's a pain to have to boot up Windows just to test with IE! Keep up the good work!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
"Developers typically have to write different markup to get the same desired outcome, even across the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers." Typically, no. For IE, yes! What does hardware acceleration have to do with web standards? Once again you're promoting something that only works on Windows and only works in IE and only those computers that have such hardware.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Robin: Sorry, no.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@anonymous Firefox 4 also plans to have hardware acceleration, both in Direct2D and OpenGL flavors. But they will be able to provide a lot more with Direct2D has more complete APIs for this sort of work.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I have a C2D laptop @ 1.86 GHz, 3 GHz RAM, Intel 965 Express Graphics with WDDM 1.1 drivers, Windows 7 32-bit yet I get 938.1 ms latency in Sun Spider test. What's going on? With Platform Preview 1 also, I got above 1000 ms. Are you posting fake results?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Getting better. I really hope you guys update this JS engine though. Not even close to running the same JS version as others, which makes me question the fairness of that graph. Hopefully this will be WP7's browser later on, because as it stands the IE in the emulator appears to be IE7.5 (based on testing). This is really bad when you figure Microsoft is starting over and could have just used an open source alternative like WebKit.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
The #2 IE9 Preview screams on my HP desktop. It loads sites like imediately and OMG the browser tile game is fast compared to Chrome 5 beta. getElementsByClassName is long overdue but still missing from 8. You guys have turned around a 10 year sinking torpedo. Cheers to the team. Please stay focused on IE9 this time.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
someone: Don't be silly. What are your numbers in the other browsers. templrin: <<Not even close to running the same JS version as others>> suggests you don't understand much about JavaScript versioning.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Robin, good to see you here. Well, if you ran Windows all the time it wouldn't be a pain to boot it up...Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Imagine my surprise when clicking on the "JavaScript" link in this sentence: "The Preview also fixes many issues that users have reported with our SVG, JavaScript, and CSS3 implementations" sent me off to my own bug in the Connect database... :-) Now off to grab a copy of the second preview... keep fixing bugs guys... looking good! Cheers,
- Bill
Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Blah, I'm thinking you know very little about JavaScript. They don't even have get and set, lets not even get started listing all the other objects missing. Yes, we all know versions mean nothing when IE doesn't add the features required to meet said version, yet have others. https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/SearchResults.aspx?FeedbackType=0&Scope=0&CreatedDays=9999&SortOrder=5&TabView=0Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
I think it's quite unfair to compare a developer preview of IE with hardware acceleration to the lastest stable release of Firefox, without hardware acceleration. The Firefox 3.7 Alpha has had hardware acceleration for a while, just flip two switches in about:config. The plan is to have it activated for the final release.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Is there any chance a VPC image, with Vista SP2 (or newer) and IE9 Preview, can be made available?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Thanks for the update, we really appreciate these blog posts about the progress you have been making. I would really like to know your stance with the canvas tag. So far I have not seen anything about the canvas tag except the comments section, it's as if you are avoiding the subject all together. Is it planned, if it is, which platform preview version? While it is possible to do svg animation, it is by nature not as suitable as a drawing api, which can be provided by canvas. Ithink it would be a big mistake not to support it, especially after all the good work done by the IE team on hardware acceleration.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
What good is a browser if most of the people keeps using XP and won't be able to use it? Maybe you should make some arrangement with the company that developed that OS and make it work there.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Why is it that first class browsers like Chrome and Firefox are available on XP in their latest iterations but not this?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Your scrolling text demo [1] seems like something that would be better implemented with CSS Animation and 3D transforms [2]. [1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/12ScrollingText/Default.xhtml [2] http://www.gesteves.com/experiments/starwars.htmlAnonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
@John Because IE9 is going to be released at a future date when even less people will be using XP.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Raffi and John Actually, it's because IE9 relies on APIs for hardware acceleration that are available only on Vista and newer. Supporting Windows XP would require coding a separate graphical backend.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
WHERE IS <CANVAS> OR <SENCE>? WE NEED IT, NOT COM AND C++! AND .NET-DEVELOPED ADDONS! LIKE VISUAL STUDIO 2010. AND IT SEEMED NOTHING IMPROVED ON ISSUE 556799. CHINESE CHARACTERS DISPLAYED INTO BOXES AGAIN!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I can't, nor would I want to, install Silverlight on my Ipad, which is what I'm using to read your site right now. Embedded video fail.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Chess Yeah ipad really fails at embedded video.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I understand the desire to impress with H/A, but not supporting XP just irritates all the web developers that you are trying so hard to please. Every web developer is looking at what you are doing and immediately saying, "Looks great, but since XP can't upgrade I'll still be writing broken IE 7/8 code for the next ???". I don't know how long XP will still be around, but Microsoft hasn't end of lifed it yet, which means long enough.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Brian LePore Browser mode dictates how conditional comments are evaluated and what UA string is sent to the server. Document mode dictates how markup is parsed, rendered and what OM functionality is available. Only document mode can be controlled by the content author while browser mode is toggled by the user and the Microsoft compatability list. Toggling the browser mode can affect the default document mode for a given page. For more info, look for [How IE8 Determines Document Mode] posted at the beginning of March.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I'm sorry to probably do again a comment that I may have already done, but in your testing center (http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/), the "Cross-browser Test Results Summary" leads to think that IE is more standard-compliant (full dark green 100% column) than other web browsers, what most people know is currently false even for IE9. Where are your tests for the <canvas> element ? Where are your tests for the new HTML5 tags (section, article...) ? Where are your tests for .textContent (instead of the current IE-specific .innerText) ? I think that you should add a mention to say that it's these tests are developed for IE9 development phase. Moreover, you only give results for the tests you submit to the W3C. Aren't there other already tests ? I would like to point out also that Microsoft has developed an ECMAScript 5 test suite (http://es5conform.codeplex.com/). Why don't you add it to your testing center ? I must admit that so far, you seem to only deal with DOM issues, but the testing center seems to be generic.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Thanks Gyrobo for the answer. I hope that development at least continues for XP so that the majority of users can have the best experience possible.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Dean - with these improvements it's going to make it harder to justify the investment in Silverlight. This is sad given that the developer experience is so much better than HTML5/JavaScript. Any comment on the discussions earlier this week of integrating EMCA CLI and ECMAScript from Joe Hewitt and Miguel: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/May-03.htmlAnonymous
May 05, 2010
@David Bruant > Where are your tests for .textContent (instead of the current IE-specific .innerText) ? Please visit https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=334438 DOM 3 Core textContent is now over 6 years old. Firefox 1.5 supported textContent. regards, GérardAnonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Ehhh... Install Silverlight? HTML5?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
At this rate IE9 has a chance of getting 100% on Acid3 before firefox !Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I absolutly love this build. Keep on going with this great work guys. For all those XP-users, wake up! We all live in 2010. What exactly do you expect from Microsoft? Supporting XP until you die? MS is first and foremost an economically company. They have to sell Windows licences to invest in new products like IE9. If you all just sit forever on XP, MS will not make any money and so no further development can be ensured.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
This will be frakin' best web browser on the planet :)Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Xael: I don't care about XP support as an user, but I do care a lot as a developer. If 55% of our user base will be stuck with IE8 on XP then thinking "yada, you losers, wake up" is not gonna help me. Many people never update OS, they just buy new computers. And pretty powerful machines have been sold with XP in the last years - for regular user (mailing, some surfing, a bit of youtube, sorting photos) those will be enough for the years to come.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Please MS implement the canvas tag. Web based Image/Photo editting programs rely on it. Also a program I'm working on relies on it because I need direct pixel manipulation (I'm building an HTML5 Photo Mosaic Generator).Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
There were few things in the world I hated more than the MSIE team for what they've done to my poor little soul for years and years and years..., well. However, that seems to be a story of the past. Big congratulation for what seems to become the best product ever shipped by the IE team. Awesome benchmarks, promising HTML5 support. Wow! Keep it up!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Awesome. By the time IE9 ships you should only be 50% slower than the then current version of Chrome or Opera.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Where is <canvas>? If you don't implement it, MS is not real about HTML5!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Keep up the good work guys. I am extremely impressed with the huge jump on the Acid3 test score. 68/100 is very impressive. Just think you are only 32 points away from a 100. If you guys can live up to the hype that IE9 is made out to be, you guys will be guaranteed that some Firefox and Chrome users will return to IE. Now, if you guys can increase the security in IE9 without slowing it down, I will be extremely impressed. Keep it up!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Hi Are you going to have a Mac version? And sorry if I missed this... When is the target date of this being done?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Love the IE Previews. Is there any way to make IE8 use the rendering system from IE9 (Trident 5, the new JS system...)? Maybe something like ChromeFrame does?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I think I heard IE 9 will only work with windows 7... So how in the heck do you test for this if it only works for one specific operating system... Are you forcing all freelance web designers to go out and buy windows 7 even if they are using another platform just to test their websites? I don't want to buy a whole OS just for browser software. =OAnonymous
May 05, 2010
Small fonts still look noticeably worse than cleartype. Try reading email or using Google Reader with it. The text looks edgy and angular and spidery. I don't know whos idea it was to focus on having fonts scale really huge with nice edges when the vast majority of browser use is at small font sizes.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Can you provide an Ogg Theora version of the video? It will make playback in Firefox very convenient. Thanks.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Steve: IE9 will run on Windows Vista and later versions. To run it on a Mac, you'll need to use a Virtual PC / Parallels / etc.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Paul: Sunspider is one benchmark, and one that measures only one thing. The real web is about much more than what Sunspider tests. Try running the IETestDrive site's demos in Chrome and I think you'll see that the Google guys have a lot of catching up to do.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Since Dean mentioned they received a question from a Gmail engineer about differentiating content, does that mean Google is working on an IE9 Standards Mode version? Hopefully. Because right now it loads in IE9 SM but is not functional. Switching to IE8 SM, it does load correctly.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
You have made EVERYTHING in IE9 DirectX faces and textures, Why not a direct manipulation on it? Why no more direct manipuoation on these faces and textures?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Great job! But the Flickr demo needs some mip mapping.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Is there anyway to force software rendering? I ran IE9 on a slow machine, Win7 and ATI Radeon x600 and hardware acceleration seems to make performance worse. I think it's because there aren't Win7 video drivers provided for old DX9 cards by ATI. So it's using some slow Windows OOB driver. Or maybe the card is just terrible.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Sounds like Microsoft is finally making a Web browser! Looking forward to it.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Raffi, yes, you can force D2D mode; search the release notes for "D2D Force" at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/ReleaseNotes/Default.html. Having said that, an x600 should be plenty fast-- it's definitely faster than the card I have in this machine, which runs the PPB demos pretty quickly.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@raffi We're checking IE performance on a wide variety of hardware; where we find issues, we will fix them. :)Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Damian: Actually, more D3D than D2D according to their goals. @infinte: Managed code is not suitable for such an application. @Aryeh Gregor: AFAIK, only H.264 Baseline videos, that's why Google had to recode some videos. @Xael: Well, one might come up with the fact that Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010 still support XP… @Dominic Pettifer: Subpixel positioning might pose a problem (like it did in WPF and they made it toggleable in WPF4) @Jon: I aggree. SVG > Canvas. @Steve: Vista too. @Ray Stantz: Please read the previous 2 blog posts, they explain that MS - unlike Google - is afraid of the legal situation surrounding Theora/Vorbis. The don't believe the devs from ON2 and Xiph where good enough at avoiding patents they haven't licensed. BTW: The "DOM Range & Selection" demo is broken?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
@Frank Olivier[MS]: Including on PC with a with a VIA processor and a Matrox GPU? ;)Anonymous
May 05, 2010
As many other web developers, I'm glad Microsoft has given a green light for the IE team to embrace web standards and improve inter-browser compatibility. That certainly makes our jobs much easier. I've been developing for the last two years a web-based rights violation database. When the project started, I made a deliberate choice not to spend time hacking code to make it work on IE6/7/8. The direction IE9 is taking made me reevaluate the decision. After downloading the platform preview, I'm happy to report it would work flawlessly if one more IE bug is fixed: an improved getElementsByName() function that captures all elements (a behavior found in firefox, opera and webkit-based browsers). Can the developers confirm this will be fixed in final IE9? CheersAnonymous
May 05, 2010
...I had already declared an xml version thus I assumed IE would default to excepting it as application/xhtml+xml. Just to make sure though, I added the appropriate meta tag as well and IE8 and 9 will still not render the page. This is the test page I keep talking about. http://www.rmphantasy.net/x_Test/New_RMP/showthread.php If you look at the source code, you'll see that nothing passed the self-closed script tag will work, not even the title tag.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
@Matt You should join Microsoft Connect and file an incident for the desired behaviour if it dosn't exist yet. Requests in comments are more easily missed than requests in bug tracking systems.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
To those saying we don't need Canvas because we have SVG. The two aren't competing technologies, they are meant for different purposes. SVG allows scalable resolution independent images with animation, and it gives you a DOM to play with in JavaScript, good for UIs. Canvas provides direct pixel manipulation and is suitable for drawing/paint applications and direct photo editing and photo manipulation (think correcting red-eye, airbrushing, that sort of thing). Really we need both technologies, otherwise MS will just show that they're behind the curve yet again (all the other browsers support Canvas). @Wurst: I wasn't referring to subpixel manipulation, don't know where you got that from. But would SVG allow me to load up an image then look directly at it's individual pixels and modify them? I could be wrong but I don;t think it does.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
For getting more test audience, maybe you could add the IE9 preview to browsershots.org?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I'm already a fan! The video is great, but i imagine that those demos were 'written' for IE9. Anyway if you sum up + and - i'm convicned that IE is still the best browser out there.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
The improvements are impressive. However, is implementing a basic UI with an address bar and back button so difficult?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Sylvain, re Gerards excellent comment at the top. I guess you can believe it's in the culture if it helps you sleep at night. I've never heard of CSS being referred to as markup until I read this blog post. It seemed strange to me because I have never had to write different markup to get the same result cross browser. The only thing I've had to do different is the CSS for IE. CSS3 spec isn't final, CSS2.1 has been around for ages and you guys have still not got it right, so pointing out problems between Firefox Safari and Chrome makes MS Developers look terrible to be honest.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
That graph up there is really impressive. Try plotting it without including IE8 and the performance difference between all the other browsers and IE9 really stands out. 600ms is a looong eyeblink!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
@Wurst What I mean is Managed code for ADDONS, not KERNEL. The KERNEL needs C++ for performance, but ADDONS NEEDN'T!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
This is a little off the topic, but can you guys ensure that the vertical scroll bar is absolutely on the right of the screen? In the PP u have to carefully position the cursor to grab the bar, while in Chrome ( for eg. ), moving the mouse way to the right just gets the cursor over the scroll bar, which is quite convenient. Thanks!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
Nice work guys. 1 question I have is if IE9 uses Media Foundation to support H.264, does this mean it will add the H.264 Media Foundation decoder to Windows Vista as only Windows 7 has H.264 decoding as far as I know?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
To start: Thanks for the IE9 platform previews. Having more interaction with your users sounds like a follow-up on the Windows7-success-story. Please note that I really like the improvements, especially the acceleration of graphics. Keep up that good work. For once, IE is taking lead by offering something other browsers don't offer yet. :) What I would like to see in the next previews is some more HTML5 support. Right now some html5-features are getting community-adoption, but aren't available in the IE9 preview yet. Among those are: canvas-tag, section elements, canvas DOM support, video element, audio element, typed form elements. Those are gaining popularity among the HTML5 examples floating around the web, but are not testable in the IE9 preview. It think it would benifit IE9 -a LOT- if you would add that support at a very early stage. It shows that the IE team is really dedicated to supporting standards (which is a very good thing) and it would enable the feedback-loop to focus on those features also. Keep up the good work and good luck with the development of upcoming versions.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
To start: Thanks for the IE9 platform previews. Having more interaction with your users sounds like a follow-up on the Windows7-success-story. Please note that I really like the improvements, especially the acceleration of graphics. Keep up that good work. For once, IE is taking lead by offering something other browsers don't offer yet. :) What I would like to see in the next previews is some more HTML5 support. Right now some html5-features are getting community-adoption, but aren't available in the IE9 preview yet. Among those are: canvas-tag, section elements, canvas DOM support, video element, audio element, typed form elements. Those are gaining popularity among the HTML5 examples floating around the web, but are not testable in the IE9 preview. It think it would benifit IE9 -a LOT- if you would add that support at a very early stage. It shows that the IE team is really dedicated to supporting standards (which is a very good thing) and it would enable the feedback-loop to focus on those features also. Keep up the good work and good luck with the development of upcoming versions.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
I am lovin' it.........works so well on my Windows 7 desktop. Thank you developers!Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Keep up the good work IE team! You've just passed the Nintendo DSi browser in the acid3 test (it scores 59). Although you need to catch up and add the canvas tag which is supported in pretty much every browser these days including the Nintendo DSi! As always I would like to remind you to share the code with the WP7 team, they will need it =)Anonymous
May 05, 2010
... Drawing images on DirectX Textures is not difficult. Get Surface and DC, then GDIPlus or DX. But I can't understand WHY DON'T you provide <canvas> or something that has the same function( e.g. <stage>)? Is there any technical problem? or YOU DONT WANT TO?Anonymous
May 05, 2010
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May 05, 2010
XP use is not going away any time soon, like it or not. But maybe IE market share will go away if people discover they can use a browser like Chrome or Firefox on XP.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Just when the world was getting a standards compliant version of IE9 which is the real deal, Microsoft make us pay the Windows 7 or Vista tax. XP is well supported till April 2014 so all releases of IE within the April 2014 timeframe should support XP. Microsoft has done this in the past for by offering IE6 for Windows 2000, 98, Me and even NT 4.0. It's because with XP people are so hooked onto the mature OS that they are deliberately using APIs that aren't available on XP. Hardware acceleration is nice to have but not critical for browsing the web. Opera 10.53 on XP without hardware acceleration does much better than IE9 on Windows 7 and feels less laggy in Microsoft's own IE9 tests. Upgrading the OS is the tax XP users must pay for IE9. Which is WRONG. Get rid of the OS barrier Microsoft then we will talk browser versions. It's not my problem that Vista was not released till XP got 7 years old and Vista flopped.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
This all looks great. You're making some great progress and will hopefully reach a point that's on par with the other major browsers... and speaking as a web dev, trust me, we all want progress as much as you do! I have to say, though, that I shudder every time I hear the IE team mention that IE9 will "fix" the messy CSS3 "problem" other browsers create and that there will be unicorns and puppies for everyone. That ignores a key factor about CSS3 that should be close to the IE team's heart: CSS3 isn't a standard yet. It could change. To put it another way, vendor prefixes prevent another IE6. Let's look at border-radius for example. It's not a standard yet; CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders is a Candidate Recommendation. It's almost there, but not quite. What happens if a browser implements border-radius but the implementation changes before it's made into a full W3C Recommendation? Well, developers would have to create a browser-specific stylesheet that reflects the outdated implementation in that individual browser. Using vendor prefixes like -webkit-border-radius and -moz-border-radius, though messy, allow developers to ensure that they can use a feature without the fear of having its implementation change later on before it is standardized. Personally, I don't want to see a bunch of <!--[if IE 9]> conditionals in my sites. Seems from your posts lately that you're using the term "standards" when it's convenient. Take a look at what some of the other browser families have been doing lately and learn from them: they've been doing great work over the last few years.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
Brian, the delta is far less than 600ms. As the demos point out, browser performance is about a lot more than JS engine benchmarks. Mark, you can't set the Content-Type to XHTML via a Meta tag, you have to actually set the header. Why? Think about it... by the time IE has decided to look for a META tag, it's already decided that your document is HTML (because otherwise, it wouldn't bother looking for a META tag).Anonymous
May 05, 2010
<<<XP is well supported till April 2014 >>> No. XP is in extended support (security patches only) until 2014... it exited mainstream support (where you get new features) quite a while ago. XP is nearly 10 years old now.Anonymous
May 05, 2010
XP's market share is dropping very fast indeed. Microsoft is absolutely right in dropping XP support.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
@Mark Grgurev: meta tags will not help you. Open up your page in Firefox or Web Inspector or whatever, and look at the HTTP headers. You will see the header "Content-Type:text/html". This must be changed to "Content-Type:application/xhtml+xml" or something like that, if you want XML processing. In vBulletin you should be able to do this by hacking includes/functions.php. Note that this means your site will completely stop working in IE < 9, and also if there's any XML syntax error; you probably do not want to do this. In any event, it's not a bug in IE9. It's the behavior of all other browsers too, and is standardized by the HTML5 Working Draft: <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#html-vs-xhtml> @kabkab: IE8 has a CSS 2.1 implementation that's as good as any browser's, if not better. What particular bugs are you thinking of when you say they haven't gotten it right? @Justin Russell: See the W3C Process Document: <http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#cfi> The Candidate Recommendation phase is a Call for Implementations, and browsers are expected to implement the spec at this point. The CSS Working Group in particular has concluded that CR is the correct stage for browsers to drop vendor prefixes. Opera already has border-radius unprefixed, and I expect Gecko and WebKit will drop it by their next major releases. By advancing the spec to CR, the CSSWG has committed not to change it incompatibly once there are implementations.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
So are you going to release versions for people that aren't on Windows based systems? If not, then why should I care about developing for IE. Hopefully IE will be 100% standards compliant (HA! Fat chance of that happening...) so if someone comes across my site using IE, everything will look good but I'm not going to waste my time developing for something that isn't cross-platform.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
@Mark Grgurev <script ... /> is not valid XHTML. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.3 : "All elements other than those declared in the DTD as EMPTY must have an end tag." http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd : script is NOT declared as EMPTY.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
@Aryeh Gregor: Thanks for the link. I was under the impression from the document that changes were still possible until the Recommendation release (see the Purpose in section 7.4.5), but it looks like you're correct. In fact, it can't be any clearer than section 3.3 on here: http://w3.org/TR/css-beijing/#experimentalAnonymous
May 06, 2010
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May 06, 2010
I dont understand why people are complaining about a 10 year old OS! Come on people, move on already! Windows 7 + IE9 will rock!Anonymous
May 06, 2010
Hi, will you support SMIL or not? Which ACID3 value is defined in the product definition of IE9? Best Regards JoergWAnonymous
May 06, 2010
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May 06, 2010
Any canvas support?Anonymous
May 06, 2010
Hey guys...good job! now, will you release ie9 for windows 3.1? if you don't, I am going to cry. :'(Anonymous
May 06, 2010
Co len IE9!!! Co len Microsoft!!! Hay danh bai Google Chrome va Mozilla Firefox :) -- Comment tren browser Chrome 5 beta :DAnonymous
May 06, 2010
Отличный браузер IE9. Мне понравился! :) Буду тестировать...Anonymous
May 06, 2010
Chrome 6.0 still is faster than IE9 PP2. AppleWebKit/533.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.399.0 http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/Anonymous
May 06, 2010
http://ajaxian.com/archives/web-2-0-expo-browser-panel "One other topic of conversation from the panel was IE9 and Canvas. I asked the crowd who would like to see canvas supported in IE9 (didn't show up in yesterdays preview). 80% of the crowd put their hands up, and I am sure the other 20% just didn't get them up in time ;) Giorgio of Microsoft himself put his hand up, which was nice. The strange comment from him was that the canvas spec is "big" which was refuted by Brendan. Microsoft has implemented SVG support which is massive in comparison, and I am sure they could wire together canvas API calls to the underlying 2d engine ;)" Microsoft still doesn't support or respect web standards. Same markup? I believe it when I actually see Canvas support.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
No, that statement was not "refuted" by anyone (you should look up the word "refuted"). Brendan disagreed, but that doesn't make him correct, particularly since the term "big" is entirely subjective-- it's at least 30 printed pages, not counting the references, and "big" can refer to more than just the literal size of the text. Microsoft is doing the editing for that spec, so they know exactly how big it is. The SVG spec is huge.Anonymous
May 06, 2010
@toth3max The Nintendo DS/DSi use Opera. So while your comparison was cute, it's not that impressive. Opera is the flipside of standards support: too strict and not realistic (so strict that many real web pages don't work right). @Confidential The platform preview is not at all the UI for IE9. So while it may have some bugs with the scrollbar as you mention, it's not likely those will be present in the actual release of IE9 (or the beta). They'll have completely different UI code.Anonymous
May 07, 2010
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May 07, 2010
@Matt: The Canvas 2D Context spec <http://dev.w3.org/html5/2dcontext/> is edited by Ian Hickson, like (the rest of) HTML5. Maybe you're thinking of something else. It's more than thirty pages, but tiny compared to SVG, which Microsoft implemented (from scratch?) for IE9. I don't personally know anything about 2D graphics, but Robert O'Callahan of Mozilla has said (from experience, I take it) that "implementing canvas on top of Direct 2D is really quite easy".<http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20100316#l-969>Anonymous
May 07, 2010
Editing != Editor. See http://blogs.msdn.com/eliotgraff/archive/2009/11/20/ie9-and-i-were-in-the-news-yesterday.aspx "really quite easy" != "not big", and I'm not sure Mozilla has a lot of credibility when talking about IE.Anonymous
May 07, 2010
@JoergW: Some of the SMIL features can be found already in HTML+TIME @Badger: Opera being too strict? I remembered Opera as the browser implementing many IE quirks and MS proprietary extensions like document.all and such…Anonymous
May 07, 2010
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May 07, 2010
Very nice progress IE Team! Any chance on the IE9 Preview #3 also being released in 64bit flavour ? What are your plans on moving plugins to their own boxed process so that they can't bring down the entire browser anymore? Likewise will any enhancements be made to plugins not affecting general browser performance in any way. An example with IE8 is that having the Java plugin enabled, causes new tabs to be opened a lot slower (perceptably).Anonymous
May 07, 2010
You know this would be NICE if Microsoft FINALLY puts out a CSS3 compliant product. I was so fed up with the bugs in IE8 that I went back to IE7 and refused to sue IE8 no matter how many times Windows Update suggested I download it. Microsoft currently holds a horrible reputation with web designers because of the difficulty in W3C compliant web design. I would be pleasantly suprised if IE9 actually meets the standard, but quite honestly, I am in the "I will believe it when I see it" mode. Excuses I saw in the various trade shows I went to and in the press releases did not impress me at all. Seemed too much like Microsoft was bucking responsibility for meeting consumer demand for a W3C compliant product.Anonymous
May 08, 2010
XP users (me included) stop complaining. So what if IE9 is not available. You should try out google chrome frame which runs within IE. This is continuously updated and works well. Few issues relating to printing yet to be sorted out but otherwise is good. This will any day beat IE9.Anonymous
May 08, 2010
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May 08, 2010
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May 08, 2010
@Aryeh Gregor: SVG is based, in part, on VML and IE has had VML support since version 5.0, so they may have been able to use that as a starting point.Anonymous
May 08, 2010
People, stop saying "xp users, get w7". That's not an issue here. Most of people reading this blog probably have vista or win7 anyway. The issue are the 'normal' people. Our page has now 55% of xp users, and that number has almost not changed in a year. If ie9 isn't available for xp, then I am looking towards years of coding for ie8 (which was outdated before it even came out). I don't know when ie9 will be out but I doubt the situation will change substantially in a year. Please, don't let ie8 become the new ie6Anonymous
May 08, 2010
beside performance, would IE team consider to add some functionality benefit to the end user?
- native spell check, rather than 3rd party installation
- easier way to write extension, com/.net based still cannot archive the rapid growth like firefox and chrome do
Anonymous
May 08, 2010
Will the debug menu to allow you to render as IE5-IE8 be kept in the final version? This would make an amazing developer tool. How come IE6 is not there? If we had IE6,7 & 8 rendering modes in-built and could use developer tools with them it would be incredibly useful!!Anonymous
May 09, 2010
Madriss: The IE Developer toolbar (available by pushing F12) allows you to select a document mode. IE6 isn't there (or in the PPB) because the IE6 rendering code was replaced by IE7's engine. When we built IE8, we recognized the utility of keeping older modes available for compatibility reasons. Hence, in IE9, you have Quirks (~IE5), IE7 Standards, IE8 Standards, and now IE9 standards modes available.Anonymous
May 09, 2010
@madriss: You might be interested in the tool Microsoft SuperPreview that is part of the Expression Package but also distributed freely at microsoft.comAnonymous
May 09, 2010
Getting my hands over it.. Blogged it too... http://windowsvj.com/wpblog/2010/05/internet-explorer-platform-preview-two-is-out/Anonymous
May 09, 2010
I wish Microsoft would make a browser to compete with Google Chrome. The reason that IE continues to lose market share is not just because Chrome is technologically superior, it is because, too, that people associate IE with slowness, security issues, bugs, non-standardness, etc. As long as Microsoft continues to stay on the IE bandwagon, IE will continue to lose market share. I say, it is time that Microsoft make an entirely new browser with an entirely new name that really gives Chrome a run for its money. But MS won't do that; they will continue to make IE, and it will continue to lose market share until Chrome rules. Another market lost to MS stupidity. Next up: the OS market.Anonymous
May 09, 2010
Yes, Microsoft needs to give Chrome a run for their money. I mean, Chrome has 1/10th the marketshare of IE, so I'm sure the IE team feels terrible to be losing so bad in the marketplace. Oh, wait, that doesn't make any sense, does it?Anonymous
May 10, 2010
A little off-topic about a feature request: Why don't put an option to isolating IE in a Secure Desktop (on user request)? It can be useful for delicate operations and transation. Thank you, bye!Anonymous
May 10, 2010
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May 10, 2010
Sorry - Off-topic, but anyways... In the dev tools, please put a JS DOM browser like firebug has so you can inspect JS objects from the window object down. This is very handy for debugging code as I often store references to objects in global vars/objects (ie references to YUI elements). Also, for the new network monitor, please add a right-click option to open request in new tab/window. If you are debugging a problem with a XHR call, sometimes it's nice to just open the request in a new window and hit F5 until it's fixed.. Must work with POST too.. Fiddler doesn't let you do this (in an IE tab anyway). Lastly, for the user interface, please rip-off chrome's feature of dragging tabs into new windows and vice-versa.. this is very handy for development.Anonymous
May 10, 2010
@Lance: "Fiddler doesn't let you do this (in an IE tab anyway)." Sure it does, just tear-off the Request Builder tab (click the button on the Options tab) and set your Response Inspector to the WebView tab.Anonymous
May 10, 2010
Why is it still slower than old competitive browsers? The average end-users really emphasize speed. That's where they spend there money; and, that is where businesses make their money. Customers always ask, "Is there anything you can do to make my computer faster?" SPEED! SPEED! SPEED! Speed is three times as important than the other "new" features.Anonymous
May 10, 2010
Bruce, are you a troll, or did you simply not try the demos? The preview is waaay faster than Firefox and Chrome on things users care about... users don't sit around and run artificial benchmarks like sunspider.... boring!Anonymous
May 11, 2010
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May 12, 2010
http://html5readiness.com/ Please check this out guys. If you want the tech community to take your commitment to HTML5 and CSS3 seriously, you have to improve on graphs like these.Anonymous
May 13, 2010
I just downloaded the new preview and tried viewing my site which uses CSS3 extensively and IE9 fails miserably. Firefox,Chrome & Safari all display my site pretty close to the same with each not showing something correctly. Only Chrome/Safari show everything as it should. IE9 is missing slightly rotated pics and text, complex 5 layer shadows on text, shadows and rounded corners on containers, even the HR messes up. Most links don't do the changes they should and most pics above links are not clickable. Check out my main page at http://wmoore.ca/ with Chrome/Safari then look at it with IE9. I didn't even get around to testing local databases which already work great in Chrome. I used to be an IE promoter since IE3beta because you were always leading... now you have fallen way behind... Please start supporting ALL the standards not just the ones you want. I will keep trying IE9 till it releases but it is not looking good from what I see right now.Anonymous
May 13, 2010
I just noted that my demo area of my website(uses classic ASP written for IE4+) doesn't work unless I set the browser to IE5 yet I can view the demo area of my site with no problem using IE7 or IE8. Not sure what causes this but site was very advanced for it's time.Anonymous
May 13, 2010
You've done impressive work with CSS3 to make a site that's ugly in all browsers. the 9 preview supports rounded corners; you're doing something wrong. it doesn't support shadows. "IE5" == quirks. If you don't know that, and don't know that the fact that you used "ASP" is entirely irrelevant, I kinda doubt you're really a professional web developer.