
IE10 platform preview available - with native HTML 5 - intranation
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/04/12/native-html5-first-ie10-platform-preview-available-for-download.aspx
======
mcastner
This reads like a political attack ad. So many half-truths in here.

Just an example: they claim that Chrome "dropped support on Windows XP for
functionality that [IE Team] think is fundamental to performance." Linking to
this blog post: [http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/02/dev-
channel...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/02/dev-channel-
update_28.html)

The reality is that Chrome disabled it temporarily on the dev channel due to
crashing, and in fact brought it back for v11:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72975>

Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge the fact that they don't even have a
version of IE10, or even 9, for Windows XP!

Is this really what the browser wars are going to come to? Lies and marketing?
I thought we were over that.

~~~
nightshowerer
>Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge the fact that they don't even have a
version of IE10, or even 9, for Windows XP!

Whaa?? I'd cut them slack on not supporting XP.

~~~
Groxx
Why? Everyone else is supporting XP with no major problems. Meanwhile, MS has
the _source code_ for XP, and for some reason can't replicate that success?

~~~
barista
It's over 10 year old operating system already. Software has its shelf life. I
can't blame them for wanting to not spread their support matrix too wide.

~~~
Groxx
I don't blame them for trying to kill it off. Truly. It's been long enough,
especially now that 7 is actually a solid upgrade for nearly every use.

But I _do_ blame them for all the under-handed, customer-spiteful tactics
they've used. DirectX 10 on Vista only, though it's almost 100% compatible
with DX9 (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run). IE9+ on
Vista/7 only. It's complete bullshit, through and through, and I see no reason
to defend their methods.

~~~
daeken
> (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run

The only games with which this will work is games that support DX9 explicitly
and, for some reason, disable it. The D3D9 and 10 APIs are _completely_
different. Having worked on an implementation of DX10 for XP, I can say for
sure that this is 100% incorrect.

~~~
Groxx
/me hunts around

Aaah, I see where I got that from. Early speculation on Crysis. Apologies!

Know how well the Alky project managed to get DX10 on XP working? I just found
it now.

~~~
daeken
That was my project, and not very well haha. It worked, if you consider a lack
of shaders, lighting (IIRC), and other critical things to be "working".
Shaders were a PITA for a few reasons, not the least of which being that the
D3D10 shader bytecode was completely undocumented. Spent a couple months doing
nothing but reversing the bytecode format, and things sort of fell apart after
that. All the code's out there, though, as is the complete story of the
project and the company around it: <http://daeken.com/alky-postmortem>

~~~
Groxx
Hah, what a find :D I'll be happy to read it.

I'm not entirely convinced mimicking anything Microsoft puts out is a good
idea, even under the best circumstances. I've lately been getting pretty far
into .NET, and the more I see, the more it terrifies me.

------
pohl
_The only native experience of the Web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with
IE9._

I'm leery of the word "native" in this context. It strikes me as a marketing
phrase with little or no actual meaning. They're trying to sell me on the idea
that my HTML5 experience will somehow be better because it uses code provided
by Windows itself rather than by some intermediary library. But what is that
windows code, if not a library of code?

~~~
HardyLeung
I think it is a brilliant marketing term. yes they hijack the term "native"
but if in fact they can deliver, it will be a clear differentiator in users'
mind, like this:

IE10 = native = fast

Chrome = not native = slow

Simple message, and it works IMHO.

I'm watching MIX'11 live and so far the demos are great (like the fishbowl
benchmark, completely blowing Chrome's fish out of the water ;D) but they are
still just demos.

~~~
gruseom
The beauty of this is that if IE10 is actually faster than Chrome, then Chrome
has fulfilled its mission perfectly.

~~~
mdaniel
"Faster" is not the holy grail metric. Standard compliance and well-thought-
out interoperability are high on my list.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to use a dog of a browser, either, but in
modern times with dual-core this and 8GB that, one would probably have to
actually work at it in order to have a genuinely slow browser.

~~~
bobds
It's easier than you'd think.

------
spoondan
In discussing why IE9+ will not be available for XP, they write:

 _Others have dropped support on Windows XP for functionality that we think is
fundamental to performance._

This is completely disingenuous. What they are actually referring to (and link
to) is Google disabling GPU acceleration and WebGL on XP starting in Chrome
10.0.648.114 due to stability issues. Importantly, Google intends Chrome 11 to
re-enable these features on XP for known-good drivers. Here is the relevant
ticket:

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72975>

The thing is, I actually agree with Microsoft's decision to not support XP.
XP, like IE6, is a fundamentally flawed platform and the sooner people move
off of it, the better. I just wish they'd make the argument honestly.

~~~
Lennie
I doubt I can ever agree with Microsoft.

They have this nice campaign running about how people should upgrade from IE6
to the lastest version:

<http://ie6countdown.com/>

What does this mean ? IE8, because there is no IE6 on Vista or 7, so they are
talking about Windows XP. And their is no IE9 for Windows XP.

Windows XP extended support is till 2014. Last year (2010) Windows XP was
still being sold.

The market share of Windows XP has over 50% worldwide, Microsoft should not
ignore those users and just release a IE9 for Windows XP already.

But who am I kidding, IE9 was a rush job, it doesn't even have a proper JIT
javascript engine when you run IE9 64-bit.

On Windows 2000 IE6 is actually the lastest version, but I won't comment on
that further. ;-)

------
azakai
1\. All this talk about 'Native' is basically propaganda. There is no such
thing. All modern browsers generate native code when running JavaScript, and
most use GPU acceleration to render content (for example, Firefox uses
Direct2D, exactly the same as IE9). IE9 and 10 are not more 'native' than
other browsers.

2\. I am impressed by the work on implementing new standards - kudos to
Microsoft. But I did not see anything about WebGL, which is a very important
standard that is already implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (soon, or
already) Opera.

~~~
kenjackson
WebGL won't happen until it makes its way into the HTML spec. Historically MS
hasn't been supportive of Khronos standards. And I don't really know of any
customers important to MS that are demanding WebGL.

~~~
yuhong
Yep the story about OpenGL and DirectX is well-known now.

------
devtesla
Glad to see that Microsoft isn't going to release IE9 and just sit on it. That
is good for Windows users and good for the web.

------
arnorhs
Criticizing Firefox for not rendering something correctly seems like throwing
bricks in a glass house.

Also, I didn't see a Javascript benchmark in there.

~~~
melling
Mozilla should just thank Microsoft for finding the issue then fix it. We want
one standard. Not a big deal. It'll be fixed before IE10 ships.

------
axefrog
IE9 renders nice and quickly but in contrast to their claims of speed, I've
found their DOM manipulation to significantly underperform in contrast to the
other browsers. Firefox 4 and Chrome 10+ are able to create and insert large
numbers of new elements at the same time significantly faster than IE9, while
IE9 stutters and lags under the same conditions.

------
nextparadigms
It's good that they will keep working on IE, but since they will only release
these "previews" for a year, that means new features will always be way
earlier in Chrome and Firefox (soon) with their fast release cycles. IE10 will
launch with features that Chrome and Firefox will have 10 months before.

~~~
MartinCron
I really hope that Microsoft starts to shorten their release cycles. Releasing
once every few years made sense in the 1980s and 1990s. Not so much today.

~~~
geuis
They wont. It looks like IE10 is being bundled with the release of Windows 8.
In _late 2012_. Merde.

~~~
city41
That _is_ a fast release cycle for Microsoft! It's a step in the right
direction. Microsoft is a giant cruise ship trying to compete with speed
boats. It won't happen over night, but hopefully it either does happen or they
give up. I still feel this is great news overall, it shows Microsoft is aware
of the situation. If they ever do truly remedy this (and by remedy I mean a
very fast IE release cycle, ideally with automatic updates like Chrome does)
it will take them a while to get there. I'm just glad they appear to be slowly
turning this cruise ship around.

------
prashantv
Going to <http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/> on Chrome (dev-channel) shows a
little banner with the following message,

"Cool, you're using a Chrome 12 nightly build! Don't forget to enable your
partial hardware acceleration in the about:flags thingy..."

Seems like they're actually worried about Chrome, since Firefox and Safari
don't have any similar messages.

~~~
sid0
Firefox already has what they call "full" hardware acceleration, and Safari
has none I think, so there's nothing to show there.

~~~
fleitz
IMHO Safari actually has the best hardware acceleration. Chrome-dev channel is
catching up quickly.

By hardware acceleration I'm talking about things like -webkit-transform and
the support for various 3D transforms. I'm unsure of how it's implemented
under the hood but I know Safari kills on 3D transforms and the best part is
it works on mobile.

~~~
sid0
Mere support for CSS transforms is actually really limited. What IE9 and
Firefox 4 do on Windows 7 is accelerate all drawing and layer compositing.
What it means is that as the browsers gain support for CSS animations and
such, they get accelerated for free. Stuff like Canvas and SVG also get
accelerated. See <http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/>.

------
blocke
It's good that Microsoft is viewing integration into it's OS stack as a way to
squeeze out performance but if that also doesn't translate into an accelerated
ship schedule then who cares.

One year is an eternity.

------
WiseWeasel
FTA: "... CSS3 Multi-column Layout (link), CSS3 Grid Layout (link) and CSS3
Flexible Box Layout (link), CSS3 Gradients (link), and ES5 Strict Mode in
action. We also demonstrated additional standards support (like CSS3
Transitions (link) and CSS3 3D Transforms (link)) that will be available in
subsequent platform previews of IE10, which we will update every 8-12 weeks."

Oh, hell yes! CSS gradients and animations/transforms? Christmas came early
this year. This version can't come soon enough.

~~~
asadotzler
Where in that list do you see CSS animations? I'm old and have difficulty with
my eyes sometimes.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Transitions and 3D transforms are animations.

------
kogir
When will I be able to use the latest CSS and HTML features without vendor
tags in any browser? I'm tired of -wekbit -moz -o and -ms.

I won't count any of them as supporting stuff until it works without vendor
extensions, and I can finally stop saying things in quadruplicate.

~~~
bxr
Isn't the reason for the vendor tags that the features aren't part of the
official spec? I'd guess the answer would be once they become official or you
start generating your CSS. Doesn't even have to be that fancy, just something
to run over a css file and duplicate a declaration a few times in all the
different formats.

Probably something you should look into, I don't expect there to come a point
where vendors stop adding new proprietary properties, at least not this
decade.

~~~
ugh
Those properties are not proprietary (the vast majority at least). There is a
draft spec for most of them but agreement on the final implementation doesn't
yet exist. Browser prefixes give vendors the ability to test said draft spec
in the wild and correct course if necessary. They also make sure that
differing implementations don't make the lives of web developers hard for
decades. They are a great idea, actually.

~~~
bxr
I guess proprietary was the wrong word for what I was saying about the
properties. It wasn't my aim to imply that they were proprietary features,
just a lack of knowing a better term to refer to the property names.

------
woogley
You'd think the 'best native support' would have WebGL.

Oh well, I just hope the History API makes it soon so we can stop abusing
#anchors in a few years ..

------
iwjames
Going by the rest of the article, I'm assuming by native HTML5 they mean
hardware accelerated compositing? Good for them if so, but 'native' is
definitely the wrong word to use, and the development channel of Chrome has
supported hardware accelerated compositing for quite some time.

[https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/design-
documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome)

Can even try it out in the current stable channel if you enable it:
about:flags

IE10 and WebGL is the big question for me, which will be interesting to see
pan out given their obviously conflicting position with OpenGL.

~~~
doublec
By 'native' they mean built for Windows without any cross-platform framework
getting in the way.

------
rhygar
Unfortunately, IE 10 is at least a year to two years away from any significant
marketshare.

~~~
melling
It still creates buzz. The biggest problem is getting people to upgrade.
IE6/IE7 can't die soon enough. People on XP who are stuck on IE8 might start
feeling abandoned and switch to Chrome or Firefox.

------
kenjackson
FlexBox, transitions, gradients, and 3D transforms... glad to see progress
continuing to be made -- and they were demoing it on an ARM processor. Cool.

~~~
Lennie
I've seen people mention that the demo runs on ARM, but I can't see how that
works.

As there is no build of Chrome for Windows ARM as far as I know. And the
things isn't available from Mozilla either, which I assume would be the
Firefox-button in the tray at the bottom.

~~~
kenjackson
It's at about 2:03:48 in the Mix stream. There is no Chrome or FF logo in the
taskbar. Its the machine they use to do the last demo. It's not the machine
used in the picture on the website linked to from this story.

~~~
Lennie
I've seen the video on the blogpost, I didn't see it there.

I'll take a look.

------
emehrkay
Maybe we'll get text-shadow with IE10

~~~
paulirish
It's not in the platform preview 1. Neither are css transitions or 3d
transforms, but their messaging indicates they are coming in a subsequent PP
release.

------
defroost
I'm not a regular Windows user, but it seems like many even more tech savvy
users continually fall for this same cycle of BS from MS. The users frustrated
with IE 7 were excited about how much better IE 8 would be. It turned out, IE
8 had many of the same rendering weirdness that IE 7 had. Then came IE 9 to
save the day. Only it doesn't do nearly as well supporting HTML 5 features as
Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

So now here comes IE 10, and what's the pitch? It's gonna be damn fast. Who
gives shit? Chrome and Safari are blazing fast AND you don't have to through
all kinds of hacks, and html5.js at them as they work perfectly as is, with
nearly ALL of the HTML 5 specifications.

------
jarin
I wish that Microsoft would just use WebKit in IE10. It's just the rendering
engine, they can MSN and Bing up the chrome as much as they want.

------
AndyKelley
"Our legal terms have changed since your last visit. By agreeing to the legal
terms and requirements, you can continue making contributions to MSDN. Your
profile is linked to from all contributions that you make, so others can learn
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medals/points."

I have to agree to this to read an article? No thanks.

------
alexk7
I posted this on their comments: "Please, Microsoft, don't try to confuse
people by hijacking the word "native". An HTML 5 application does not run on a
magical HTML 5 CPU, even in IE9 and IE10. Being single platform may allow you
to develop IE faster but it is not an advantage for the user."

------
mwbiz
Is that Rob Mauceri speaking in the Video? I saw him at a round table at the
Web 2.0 Expo last month and Douglas Crockford and Alex Russell tore him a new
ass about Ecma Script 5 strict mode. Looks like he got out of the building
alive and actually listened. Cool

------
simonw
Does it support the History API?

~~~
kenjackson
No mention of this nor text shadow.

------
iramiller
Native is to browsers as Open is to Mobile OS. That is a great catchy phrase
that will get the tech blogs lots of page views while the fans argue about
whose definition is more correct.

------
rhygar
IE in a nutshell: <http://i56.tinypic.com/311s410.jpg>

The damage has been done. The legacy of IE won't be fixed with a new version
number.

------
tnorthcutt
_IE10 Platform Preview 1, available for download today is the first step..._

 _The only native experience of the Web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with
IE9._

------
tintin
Comments on that page killed the browser-star. But I appreciate Microsoft for
not removing them.

------
innes
I am liking the pugnacious tone. I suspect that with IE9 shipped, they feel
they've earned the right to make a forceful argument on how browser
development should happen.

" _Hey kid. Releasing a new version every few weeks ain't professional._ "

~~~
billybob
I thought that was called "Agile Development." What's unprofessional about it?
I'd say it's a lot more professional than letting your browser stagnate for
years, leaving security holes unpatched, etc.

As for "how browser development should happen," I think the people who can
make the argument on that are the ones who've been leading the pack for the
last 5+ years, not the ones who are still trying to catch up despite starting
out with a giant lead.

~~~
axefrog
I think your sarcasm filter might be malfunctioning. Everything you just said
was already implied by what @innes wrote...

