
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers - johns
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx
======
pierrefar
I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.

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shiranaihito
I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.

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shiranaihito
Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon.

OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web
for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit?

I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at
trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe).

See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent
people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk
about anything that really matters in the world.

~~~
jodrellblank
Saying "lololol M$ i hope they die" is frowned upon. Post something with
content, support your whining, talk about it.

Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past
few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development
teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major
products and access to give feedback to people who care.

Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil',
just the inertia of a huge company).

You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant
about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.

~~~
shiranaihito
_Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it._

Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to
tell me why they're all invalid? I've done this kind of thing before, and
every time someone disparages MS here, he's treading on thin ice. There will
always be MS-apologists around.

 _Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past
few years_

They sure have made a show of being more "open" to please/distract
programmers, that's all.

 _You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant
about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter._

I realize this is something that people don't want to hear, and can't process
without adjusting their conceptions of things, but that doesn't make it any
less true.

Want some content? Here's a video of angry muslims in London:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20>. One of the signs they're proudly
displaying says "Europe, you will pay. Your annihilation is on its way!!!".

Does that sound a tad threatening to you? That protest is probably related to
events in 2004, when they actually killed a Dutch film director, Theo Van
Gogh, for releasing this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0> .. Yes,
they _killed_ a man _for making a short movie_.

The average muslim you meet will most likely tell you that Islam is a
"religion of peace", but what they don't mention is that if you say otherwise,
they'll kill you. If it's such a mellow religion, why is there a protest full
of its followers waving signs saying that they'll destroy Europe then?

Western people believe the line about a religion of peace because they want
to, because we should all just get along and coexist in peace and harmony.
That's just the humane way of life that we as Westerners are wired to like and
want, but that's not what muslims have in mind.

\----

Update:

Quick! Someone call PG and get him to delete this thread so no one else will
see what I'm saying here!

~~~
jodrellblank
_Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to
tell me why they're all invalid?_

They are invalid in a discussion about IE9 developments because they aren't
about IE9. They are valid in a discussion about web development in general...
except they are arguing _against_ your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web
development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development
and not destroying a competing browser. In other words, Microsoft has moved on
from those (e.g. this page) so those aren't good support for your complaints
anymore.

People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their
javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners
and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?

I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years
and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of
quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online.

 _Islam_

Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots.
Particularly don't want to discuss religion or country/world politics on HN,
even more so in a thread about an IT topic. By the way, I also don't want to
discuss dishwasher detergent, pie recipes, good books on optical illusions or
how to build a canoe.

~~~
shiranaihito
_They are invalid in a discussion about IE9 developments because they aren't
about IE9._

Well then, why did you insist that I should "support my whining"? I'm pretty
sure my "whining" was just as not related to IE9 as it is now.

Besides, if you squint and look _really_ hard, you'll notice my goal here was
not really to discuss the finer points of IE 9. You've obviously got a problem
with that, but how much would you surmise I care?

 _They are valid in a discussion about web development in general... except
they are arguing against your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web
development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development
and not destroying a competing browser._

I take it that MS discussing IE 9 on a blog means that they actually never did
any of the things I listed?

 _People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their
javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners
and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?_

Wouldn't this be related to "holding back web development"?

 _I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years
and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of
quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online._

Glad you came clean. Even I realize that they've been working hard to improve
the .NET platform. They have to, because their grip on the world is dependent
on _developers, developers, developers_.. Did you see what they did to improve
IE while they weren't worried? Oh that's right! - _Nothing_.

 _Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots._

See, now that's the exact same problem I'm trying to solve. You should know
that there are people following a 1300-year-old sacred manual on how to behave
that says "kill everyone who's not a muslim", and it's happening in
_2000-fucking-9_.

You don't see Christians going on Crusades anymore, but you do see enraged
muslims shouting that they'll destroy Europe. And Europe's collective
reaction? -To apologize, look away, and hope that they calm down.

~~~
jodrellblank
_You've obviously got a problem with that, but how much would you surmise I
care?_

I guess I'll say the same about your terrorist scaremongering and call it a
day then. Nice talking with you.

~~~
shiranaihito
I'm sure you had good counter-arguments for everything I said too.

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

~~~
billybob
Me too. Not that they have much choice. Even the non-geeks in my office have
noticed that they can work faster with Firefox.

As more things move to the web, built on web standards, they can't afford to
continue having the worst browser by far.

~~~
cracell
To be far. IE8 is vastly better then IE7 and IE6 but Microsoft is not
aggressive about getting it's users to upgrade. Whereas Firefox, Safari and
especially Chrome are.

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

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WilliamLP
Is it still conspiracy theory to suggest that they are the ones with the most
to lose from a universally reliable JS and HTML implementation, so they should
want to do enough to keep IE competitive, but not enough to make it fully
compatible with everyone else?

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rbanffy
Microsoft walks a fine line between having a browser that's broken enough so
that web apps written and tested for it break on other browsers and a browser
functional enough not to drive users to move to better products.

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old-gregg
Regarding hardware-accelerated drawing of text:

I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core
APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-
accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially
a "game" running on top of DirectX, no?

Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming
you had a good card with good drivers.

What am I missing? (I haven't done any Windows work in 5 years).

~~~
drcode
The part of the post about the font rendering is BS anyway. The picture is
supposed to show "sub-pixel positioning" and it only shows antialiasing (not
even sub-pixel antialiasing) which as you've pointed out isn't handled by a
browser anyway.

"Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled
inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes
up so it can position the next item- But the picture accompanying the post is
wrong/irrelevant.

~~~
herf
Not sure I agree - most fonts are cached (as pixels) at a few offsets, so the
ability to place a character is constrained by 1-pixel increments (or
1/3-pixel increments in the case of ClearType).

A true vector placement of each character gives you the ability to show type
at any subpixel offset and then anti-alias, and I think there's a good chance
they're doing this.

See this Loop/Blinn paper for more details: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/cloop/loopblin...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/cloop/loopblinn05.pdf)

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

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ecoffey
Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave
all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file
viewers and other OS bits and parts.

No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as
things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to
content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think
users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable
machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).

~~~
statictype
Problem is, a lot of custom software depends on ActiveX controls and other
plugins that work in IE but not anywhere else.

Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like
something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have
significant usage - at least within companies.

Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one
sponsored by Apple.

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ecoffey
Right, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces,
but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking
code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-)
(indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would
celebrate!

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tlrobinson
Canvas or GTFO.

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drcode
> "perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites"

Geee, I wonder why?

Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites
because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any
other major browser????

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thaumaturgy
Eh, I don't buy that. I've got a client site that does fade-in/fade-out
effects on multiple simultaneous elements, ajaxyness, and horizontally
scrolled lists of images. It also uses jquery-like css selectors to target
elements, and it intelligently re-renders (in realtime) selected page elements
when the page is resized.

I can do all of that in IE 6, 7, or 8, without maxing out a CPU core.

What I _can't_ do, and really would like to do, is offload more of the page
rendering to Javascript, and the only reason I can't do that is because of the
various noscript users out there.

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TallGuyShort
This is nice - I don't think I've seen Microsoft look at themselves this
candidly before.

Next thing you know we'll have commercials saying "IE9? That was my idea!"

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

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lmkg
Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?

~~~
zaatar
Nope. See also: [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-
pov-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-ie6.aspx)

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

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

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pkulak
Border radius!

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

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

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

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drcode
:(

still no canvas or svg... jerks.

~~~
rufo
No mention on if they actually, truly, _really_ support transparent PNGs this
time around, either.

(If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent
PNG....)

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etherealG
that's a bug in their implementation of opacity, not of png. they don't
support existing alpha in their opacity calculations.

~~~
rufo
Whoops, you're right. I hadn't really read in-depth when I ran into this
several months ago, and I was rather peeved at the time regardless.

It doesn't really matter though - the point is, they still have a long way to
go before they can earn back the trust they've squandered amongst the web
development community.

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

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akamaka
Summary: still a long way to go.

No announcement yet on @font-face, canvas, video. Basic performance
improvements.

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halo
The @font-face spec doesn't mention a font standard, and Microsoft have
already said they won't implement TTF or OTF because the font foundries don't
like it.

It's possible that IE will implement the upcoming WOFF (Web Open Font Format)
standard in IE9 but I wouldn't rely on it.

~~~
akamaka
Sigh.

Thanks a bunch for the info.

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

