
IE9 vs. Firefox 4 (done in canvas) - tomeast
http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/ie9/ie9_vs_fx4.html
======
acabal
I'm still not sure what the point of all this is. Any developer worth their
salt already knows that IE9 is more or less a small step forward but still far
short of what it needs to be and of what FF/Chrome have accomplished ages ago.
Any non-technical user won't be reading this article and won't give a damn
about IE vs. FF vs. Chrome, as long as their internets work.

Why keep up the pissing match? Who are they talking to?

~~~
mmazing
The point is that Microsoft has been terrible at this since 1999.

They consistently do their own thing instead of going with standards, and they
are always behind the curve. They seem to be trying to catch up with standards
but have been unable to make any sort of impressive progress. To be honest, if
they've put five years into it and are still so far behind, they need to fire
some people.

Does anyone actually consider IE to be a valid contender for browsers?
Personally, I gave up years ago.

~~~
rbanffy
> To be honest, if they've put five years into it and are still so far behind,
> they need to fire some people.

You are assuming Microsoft wants to adhere to standards. I find it more likely
their strategy is to fragment the market because the day web applications
become the norm, as opposed to desktop applications, they become OS-
independent and Microsoft will have its main advantage (the Windows software
ecosystem) negated.

They won't allow that.

~~~
blub
> the day web applications become the norm,

That will never happen. Web apps have critical issues that can't be solved
even by HTML8.

~~~
rbanffy
Care to explain those issues?

~~~
blub
The issues are quite noticeable for someone that isn't heavily invested in web
apps. Most of HN is - and that's why they prefer to ignore them.

But let's look at the market... Have web apps displaced desktop apps? No. Have
they displaced mobile apps (as per HN mantra 90% of iPhone apps could be web
apps)? Not even close.

Now why is this? It's because web apps offer a significantly poorer user
experience across the board.

* with all the progress that's been made in performance, web apps are slower than native apps and will continue to be. There is only so much that you can offload from JS.

* web-apps don't have access to the platform's entire range of graphics capabilities, including standard widgets, animations and so on.

* web apps don't have access to special platform functionality such as GPS, sensors, camera, etc.

Furthermore, the biggest mobile players have all started to invest in native
mobile apps to the detriment of web apps. Including Google. It's in their
interest to lock-in users to their platform, even more so since Android became
a major player.

These issues can be worked around eventually (maybe).

The core issues with web apps can't be worked around:

1\. Web apps are using a text-transfer protocol with a pile of hacks on top to
make it stateful. To this day engineers are still working on solving this
problem (web sockets, web sql, etc). They can't solve it.

2\. One does not own web apps, one merely rents them.

~~~
samlevine
Irony: using a web app to suggest that web apps haven't displaced any native
apps.

~~~
blub
The fact that three people consider HN to be an application is nothing short
of mind-boggling. I guess if this is the case, I've been doing webapps since
before HN was even invented. We used to call them web sites back then
though...

------
dillon
This is why Developers hate IE, we have to make code specifically for that
browser. I guess if you truly hate Microsoft, you wouldn't code it and just
tell the user to download Firefox.

~~~
est
> This is why Developers hate IE, we have to make code specifically for that
> browser.

Stop using -webkit, -moz, -o first.

~~~
steveklabnik
Red herring. Vendor prefixes are part of the standards process.

Once the standard is finalized, you simply drop -moz and you're done. This is
nowhere near the same league as IE CSS/JS fixes.

------
fungi
> What's missing in IE9? ... text-shadow ... CSS3 Gradients ... border-image
> ...

really? MS wont even support frikken text shadows? ffs ms. don't ship the
fucking thing then, just take your time and get it right, please don't break
everything again, my life is to short.

what did i do to you to make you hate me so :(

~~~
alanh
The craziest thing about it is they removed the old `filter` hacks for (bad,
but hey) text shadows without replacing them with their modern CSS3
equivalent. (I should clarify: I mean in IE9’s IE9 mode, naturally.)

~~~
yuhong
filter was renamed -ms-filter and the syntax was changed in IE8.

~~~
alanh
I know. But neither works in IE9 standards mode.

------
phatbyte
The funny thing is, while as a web developer I hate with all my guts fighting
IE standards(?), I also hate how Firefox (yes even version 4) is a memory hog.
It's unbearable to work with it consuming 700mb to 1Gb of memory, with just a
few tabs and firebug on.

Chrome(webkit) on the other side, wins both of these two combined any time of
day.

Mozilla, you have come a long away, you created history when you came out with
Firefox, you destroyed IE user base back in the days, and in Europe you are
now the number one top browser. However, please stop comparing yourself to
other browsers and work on your own issues.

Point being is, I love FF (although I'm not using it lately), but I'm hating
how cocky they are becoming.

~~~
Retric
I understand that people like netbook/nettops etc, but ram is _really_ cheap.
At 10$ / Gig range there is little reason to have less than 8GB and 16GB while
probably overkill is still fairly inexpensive.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231310&cm_re=DDR3-_-20-231-310-_-Product)

~~~
phatbyte
"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM." - no idea who wrote
this

~~~
Retric
"The secret to happiness is running software on a better computer than the dev
who created it." -me

~~~
phatbyte
that just shows how bad developers are out there

------
tsuipen
I just created a user to say to the site's author:

Your site isn't HTML5 compliant, bro.

JUST SAYIN'.

[http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.mozill...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.mozilla.com%2F~prouget%2Fie9%2Fie9_vs_fx4.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

------
nhebb
Kind of reminds me of when Scott McNealy was so obsessed with Microsoft that
he didn't seem to notice Sun's real competition sneaking up behind him.

~~~
fungi
it reminds me of the last 10 years of my life wasting countless days/weeks
cleaning up after msie 6/7/8.

------
Derbasti
Well, at least IE9 is somewhat up to date. HTML5 is still a working draft that
no-one implements fully. Everyone implements a certain subset of it and I
don't quite see how one subset is supposed to be superior to another subset as
long as their is no one who implements it fully. Gee, at least Microsoft is
making an effort!

And by the way, an uncluttered, fast-starting browser that implements a
somewhat smaller subset of HTML5 than a messy, slow-as-molasses browser might
have something going for it, too. Just sayin'

~~~
chc
There is a common subset that most browsers have supported for a long time. I
think the benefit of supporting that subset is pretty obvious, and I don't see
how you can make the argument that a subset of a subset is better than the
larger subset.

------
georgemcbay
What's the deal with all of this high school bitchfesting going on lately
between Google, Microsoft and Mozilla? My opinion of each of them drops every
time they involve themselves in this crap.

How about you all stfu, work on your respective software and let your products
do the talking?

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zacharyz
Seems to render well in Chrome. ;)

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moxiemk1
We really need to stop measuring "compatibility" numerically. Its dishonest
and encourages engineering decisions to be made instead of policy ones, when
the data is purely the result of someone else's policy decision.

Not all things have equal weight; choosing which things to call an element,
which ones to merge, which ones to split is always subjective.

Valid discussions are where we fully state our chosen assumptions, not ones
where we then make fake data out of them.

------
albemuth
Does the page render correctly in IE9? :P

~~~
sp332
No, all the graphs are missing and the specified fonts aren't loaded.

~~~
tropin
Because IE is still missing something as fundamental as data uris, and the
font is specified that way in the CSS.

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kemayo
The horrible flash-of-unstyled-content suggests that this is not a good use of
canvas. :P

~~~
paulirish
The flash is because the styles are defined at the bottom of the document (not
really sure why...)

Canvas is only used for the charts.

~~~
kemayo
I placed far too much trust in the title of the story, alas.

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udp
Ugh. What's with the caps lock? This is incredibly hard to read (for me, at
least). It just looks offensive.

This is going to be far less effective than a nice, _polite_ feature
comparison would be.

------
KeyBoardG
Why would I care what platforms are supported if I only use one? Also you
could probably the numbers reversed if you asked Microsoft.

------
catshirt
seeing all this energy wasted trying to convince people firefox 4 is better
than ie 9 sort of solidifies my belief that chrome reigns supreme

~~~
drivebyacct2
Not sure why their marketing affects the actual merits of Firefox or Chrome,
but. I agree that Firefox is trying a bit too hard (though this appears to
simply be one user). Additionally, Chrome is still faster and has less ui-
chrome that gets in my way. I also find the extensions to be more cleanly
implemented still than Firefox 4's.

~~~
yesimahuman
The one thing I dislike about Chrome is that I still find it buggy at times on
my mac. Buggy in strange ways and especially with the inspector/debugger. That
being said, I still use it as my main browser. Going back to FF annoys me when
there are two input boxes (address bar and search) and that the tabs don't
close under each other (for really convenient tab closing). Other than that
I'm sort of indifferent.

~~~
paulirish
I'd love to hear more about those bugs you're getting. Feel free to bug (hah!)
me on twitter @paul_irish or report straight to <http://new.crbug.com>

------
orenmazor
all this tells me is that firefox is scared of IE. which I guess is a good
thing.

~~~
emehrkay
They have nothing to worry about. Take this from someone who is going bald at
a faster rate because I needed to assist in porting an chrome-only app over to
support IE9. FF, Safari, Opera were no problem, money was all spent on IE

------
profitbaron
I really don't get why Mozilla posted this, other then to say to the 'tech'
crowd "we're better then IE" but they already know that.

If, Mozilla really want to impress the 'tech' crowd they should show how they
compare to Chrome because, mainstream users ONLY care about being able to view
the websites they want to visit which is why most of them stick to Internet
Explorer which came installed on their PC's (despite new legislation saying
Microsoft had to suggest other browsers too) as they 'trust' that it will
display the websites they want to see.

~~~
chc
Microsoft is pitching IE 9 as, basically, "Hey guys, we finally caught up! We
now offer an awesome HTML5alicious browsing experience, so y'all can stop
switching to Firefox and come back over here!" This is Mozilla's return salvo.
It's about keeping their message out there.

~~~
profitbaron
The way it is appearing is that Mozilla are scared of IE especially when you
consider where the product has evolved from IE6.

Additionally, it needs to be said that whilst IE9 may be lacking some HTML5
and CSS3 features that Firefox 4 supports that HTML5 standards won't be
completed until 2014, and Mircosoft will have its IE product fully supporting
HTML5 by then.

I'm a firefox user but I still believe that Mozilla had no reason to do this,
other than that they are realizing that IE has become a decent competitor
again and they can't just pump out a slightly better browser to convince the
crowd to convert. They've made themselves look a little stupid especially with
regards to standards which won't be completed until 2014, and you can probably
expect Google Chrome team to release a Chrome Vs. FF4 comparing its standards
etc.

~~~
chc
I think Mozilla _is_ worried that people will accept IE 9. If Microsoft's
pitch takes hold in people's minds, the push for Firefox will lose steam.

And all of this "HTML5 standards won't be completed until 2014" talk is kind
of a semantic game. That fallacious concept is why Ian Hickson is trying to
move away from the unrealistic notion of a "totally finished standard." In
practice, most of the stuff Firefox implements is already nailed down. IE is
unquestionably lagging.

------
Charuru
Anyone else find this infographic hard to read?

Chrome 10.

~~~
alanh
Not sure what you are trying to say. I’m in Chrome 9 and it looks pretty
great.

