Microsoft's IE9: Don't believe the hype Microsoft must be rattled by the steady decline in the market share of Internet Explorer. Worldwide it has gone from 68.5 per cent in July 2008 to 46 per cent today, according to StatCounter. Internet Explorer 9, now in release candidate phase, is Microsoft's answer. Highlights include hardware-accelerated graphics, a new fast …
Opera ist still not 100% compatible with business software like ABAP and Java Webdynpro. When it will become you may dismiss IE, if they will integrate better with the policies set in the OS by the network admin. I just hope they all become good enough to allow separation based on personal taste. For business you can only use mozilla and ie so far.
Opera is also closed source and has questionable T&Cs and privacy especially where things like Turbo mode are being used (and likewise Opera Mini on mobiles). I wouldn't trust Opera any more than I would Microsoft (not to mention that for compatibility Opera can fall back to using IE engine to render).
"Microsoft's development process is too slow. IE9 was announced at the Mix conference in March 2010, nearly a year ago."
In the interests of balance, Firefox 4 was announced in May 2010, and is yet to reach RC status (beta 12 - codename "the last one, honest" - should be landing in the coming days, at which point the RC discussions can begin)
Disclaimer: I am primarily a Firefox user, which is why I didn't bother writing "l33t opera roolz!!" like the AC above.
The Mozilla guys are managing several new versions for every IE version that gets released and that's despite their issues with meeting release schedules (when was the last time they got a Firefox release out in anything like the expected time?) so I think the sentiment's right even if the illustration that went with it was a bit dodgy. And Chrome makes them both look like snails on the release front for better or worse.
I seem to recall something along those lines.
I use IE for *nothing* in my day to day browsing. However I am taking a course. Tried to go to the web page and (surprise surprise) it's implemented with ActiveX.
This "feature" and the apps that use is AFAIK the *only* major reason for retaining IE9 (or it's even less compatible forebears).
OTOH I suspect systems developed to *proper* open standards would have been slow to begin with but with faster release cycles (and ability to change *between* browsers because they can all read the same standards) they would have gotten better faster.
Do not want.
The problem with IESpell is that it is rubbish! You have to manually click an icon or open a menu for it to perform a spell-check, rather than it happening automatically in the background and underlining misspelt words in red. Considering Microsoft were the ones that invented the automatic-underlining spell-checking way back in Office 97 it's kind of ridiculous that this is not a feature in Internet Explorer!
PS: This is actually the main reason why I use Firefox over IE!
Why bother even thinking about IE 9?
There is no decision to make. You are required to purchase it regardless.
Oh, you can update now perhaps. But, when you buy an OS again, you have to purchase IE again. And again. And again.
Boy the idiots out there who develop software but fail to understand the illegal means used by Microsoft to force the purchase of IE time and time again. In exchange for cash money.
You are forced to pay for the R&D whether you like it or not. You are forced to pay for the R&D whether you use it or not.
Would not that be great? You develop some code. And then are assured of hundreds of millions in sales without lifting another finger. No one else can sell their alternatives either. There is no marketplace. It does not exist.
Do you really think anyone at Microsoft is so dumb as to not understand the benefits of forced sales? Illegally forced sales? I doubt it. Even the stupid engineers understand how to illegally secure sales to 90% of the possible consumers.
Would not that be great? And who cares what the code does? Sales are guarenteed just the same.
Even the trade press reviews what the code does. But, that does not matter either.
The concept of "sales" means there has to be a market place. Even free software is offered through a market. You cannot get away from the concept of "market", even if all software was free, the market would be the internet itself.
Second, why shouldn't R&D costs be recovered? You think software engineers work for free? Nothing in life is free, except oxygen.
Third, Microsoft does nto force anyone to use Windows. The business world chose Windows because businesses like to pay for a certain level of services to accompany products. That's life. You get what you pay for with legal obligations bound by contracts and legislation. You get something for free, you have no rights to complain.
"Illegally forced sales" - back this up please.
p.s. You are required to buy OS X to use a Mac. You are required to buy OS X to use Safari on a Mac. You are required to buy upgrades for the latest features of OS X on a Mac... at a more frequent interval than Windows I should add (remember that XP is still going strong despite Microsoft's attempts).
While the included developer tools are certainly nicer than nothing, Firebug is still far better. On IE, there are some useful features, but glaring omissions as well. For example, when determining what CSS rule applies to what element, I find it more logical to show the most significant rules at the top instead of the bottom. And it would be much nicer to be able to add rules/try out changes live from the HTML tab, instead of modifying them in the CSS tab (which shows all the rules from a single CSS file, the rules that apply to an element may naturally come from several files). And telling that rule suchandsuch comes from definition "#foo" in file "foo.css" is hardly useful, as it doesn't say a) where the file comes from (hands up, who hasn't banged his or her head against the keyboard cursing why on earth my changes don't do anything, only to figure out that the page is actually loading a different file) and b) it doesn't tell the line number. Yes, CRTL+F is certainly an option in your editor of choice, but simply jumping to a line number is much more convenient. And those are only three simple examples - Firebug is the sole reason I still keep using Firefox, it's just that good (and performance-wise, I have no complaints in the 4-series).
But (unfortunately or not), I am. Thankfully we've finally come to a point where we can say to our customers that we only guarantee compability with modern browsers, if you want IE6 support, you pay extra. Most decide not to, this takes away many of my troubles. This doesn't mean that IE7 and 8 don't have their own "creative" quirks. (IE9 is supposed to finally be much better in this regard, can't really comment yet as I just installed it) As IE9 is able to render pages like IE7/8, it would be nice that the developer tools would be a bit better. Yes I know, a pony would be nice as well.
"When your browser needs hardware acceleration, you are trying to do too much inside it. It is a browser, that is all it is."
1993 called, they want their HTML 1.0 back.
Web apps now regularly exceed the UI complexity and functionality of desktop apps, and the ability for browsers to render things more quickly makes them better. Laying out a modern CSS-heavy page is not a trivial rendering task.
Jeff, that is exactly my point. we would improve performance considerably by writing the pages so they could be rendered efficiently, rather than expecting ever more hardware to deal with the inefficient code. Mosty of it is lack of thought and or experience on the part of the developers.
I was trying to read an article on a site yesterday, and it was just text, way down on a long page. However, at the top of the page was an animated thing (can't really describe it any better than that, sorry!) that changed about every 5 seconds from one character to another and back in a continuous loop. I could have ignored it but for the fact that one character was about 3 lines taller in screen estate than the other and each time it changed, the whole page shimmied down 3 lines, then backup 3 lines, while I was trying to read it, which was really irritating.
Sure it is clever to have these effects but when I am browsing, I am not looking for how flashy (no pun intended) the site is, and how cool the graphics are, I am usually looking for written information that I want to read, i.e. text, which can be rendered in many fancy ways with no hardware acceleration required at all, or maybe typing in some answers to some questions which again is not rocket science.
You can over-engineer things and I think that describes the current state of web development in general. Keep it simple, but not necessarily HTML 1.0. :-)
"They care"
"They care very much about standards. *Their* standards."
I'm sure I've read that Windows source code is so extensive that it contains millions of lines that no one now at Microsoft knows the function of. And wasn't there a legal proceeding some years ago where the learned judge directed that MS provide documentation of some file format or other - and MS couldn't do it because, just like Windows source code, the file format contained undocumented elements?
To put it another way, MS doesn't have standards and doesn't understand standards. They think that standards are just suggestions that developers (and professional liars aka marketers) can freely vary from for any or no reason.
...which it wont.
IE6 users didn't upgrade to IE7 or IE8. Why would they upgrade to IE9? Oh, wait, they can't anyway wihtout buying a new OS (and probably PC if they're still running IE6).
And I can't test in it either without forking out for a new OS.
Great, eh?
Ha, ha ,ha:
"Microsoft is also serious about HTML5 as an application runtime, indicating at its Professional Developer Conference last year that this is its favored solution for cross-platform support."
And then ...
"While HTML5 support in IE9 is real and significant, it is not as comprehensive as the company's publicity implies. According to one test site [http://www.html5test.com], IE9 RC scores just 116, compared to 207 for Safari 5.0 and 244 for Chrome 10, in my tests."
Doing a "quick" test on some of my older browsers: FF3.6 Portable = 139; Chrome Portable 6.0 = 217. They're not even keeping up with last years browsers on the HTML5 front ... even though they use this as a "sales" gimmick "feature".
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