

IE9 to launch on March 14, 2011 - zaatar
http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/03/09/a-more-beautiful-web-launches-on-march-14th.aspx

======
jameskilton
Launch, as in end of product, it's "finished", it's in the wild, you're on
your own we will now work on IE 10?

Or launch like the rest of the software development world now operates and
push out updates on a regular basis, with new features and better standards
support, leading to something that actually has a chance of competing with the
browsers the rest of us love to use?

'Cause I think it was around 2000 that people started realizing that
monolithic development and release cycles lead to failed products. Software
needs to be, and can be, updated constantly, or it falls behind. If this
launch is like all other IE launches, it will be a day we will all look back
on with disappointment. Don't get me wrong, I would _love_ to see Microsoft
actually become a modern development house, but I have huge doubts that it
could ever happen.

------
melling
As someone who hates IE, I must say that I'm actually really looking forward
to IE9. The "worst" of the major browsers just closed the gap (and surpassed?)
with fast JavaScript and gpu acceleration.

Hopefully, there's more to come.

~~~
nailer
No gradients, no transforms, no history. That's just off the top of my head
with the stuff I already use.

~~~
Joeri
It does support 2d transforms: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-
nl/ie/ff468705.aspx#_CSS3_2D_Tr...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-
nl/ie/ff468705.aspx#_CSS3_2D_Transforms)

There are ways to use svg to implement scalable gradients:
<http://css3wizardry.com/2010/10/29/css-gradients-for-ie9/> . With some clever
engineering someone could make a library that automatically converts gradient
styles into SVG backgrounds.

~~~
nailer
Useful to know, but the simple thing I've been working on - a product browser
akin to coverflow, with bookmarkable items - needs a 'skew' effect, which is
considered a 3D transform.

------
27182818284
People will debate endlessly whether IE9 is a "modern" browser based on its
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, etc support.

The real smoking gun that it still isn't modern is that it doesn't include a
spellcheck by default. You can't claim to be doing what users want while
ignoring that elephant in the room.

~~~
contextfree
My guess is that the real reason for this is that Windows 8 will add a native
spellcheck API (technically Vista already did, as part of WPF, but that
generally isn't used by consumer applications for various reasons), and in the
meantime to avoid future confusion they don't want to implement it separately
in IE.

------
pzxc
Is it true that it won't work on Windows XP? I know XP is like a decade old,
and I really don't wanna start an upgrade-your-browser-you-noob flamefest, but
it seems kinda lame to exclude the people still on XP from having a modern
browser and I can't figure out what the rationale might be for that.

~~~
mmastrac
There's never been a good reason publicly stated, but I imagine they don't
want to be seeing as supporting their decade-old OS.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari have no problem doing it, so it's very likely a
political decision.

I think Microsoft has some responsibility to update IE6 on XP, given that they
left it out on the market so long and caused an incalculable amount of time to
be lost developing for it while the rest of the worst was trying to move on.

~~~
zaatar
Actually, no. The good reason that IE9 does not run on Windows XP has been
publicly stated for _at least_ an year, if not actually longer. The FAQ on
ietestdrive.com [1] answers this question. The short answer is that the
Graphics stack that IE9 uses is not available on Windows XP.

[1]
[http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/FrequentlyAskedQuesti...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/Default.html)

~~~
mmastrac
It's a bogus technical reason. Chrome and Firefox show that GPU acceleration
can work on XP:

<http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/>

[http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-
acceleration...](http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-acceleration-
on-web.html)

If Microsoft wanted to support GPU acceleration through an alternate rendering
path like _two_ other browsers are doing on XP, they would have done so.

I find it more likely to conclude that they just didn't want to support XP and
developed a browser GPU acceleration engine that wouldn't support it as a
result of this high-level decision.

~~~
zaatar
That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but having looked at the code myself,
I'd have to say someone must be _nuts_ to have gone to extra efforts to create
a new engine that specifically won't run on XP.

~~~
mmastrac
Huh? I never said they wrote the graphics stack not to support XP. I said that
there's no technical reason why you can't have a fallback rendering path to
work on XP. Chrome and Firefox show that this is possible.

You can point at the FAQ all day, but you can't deny that there is a way to do
GPU acceleration of web content on XP.

~~~
Joeri
Actually, chrome and firefox demonstrate that there is a technical reason,
since they both only implement accelerated compositing on XP, not accelerated
content layout.

------
woogley
Well, there goes any hopes of WebGL. It's a shame, too, the spec was just
finalized last week.

------
zaatar
The Channel 9 video is at: [http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/IE9-RTW-
Due-Date-A-Bi...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/IE9-RTW-Due-Date-A-
Big-Thank-You-MIX11-and-a-Unicorn-Named-Frank)

~~~
mmastrac
Thank god they finally got rid of that Silverlight crap for those channel9
videos.

It still doesn't work in Firefox4 though. Not sure if I'm surprised.

~~~
contextfree
They didn't, it still uses Silverlight if Silverlight is installed. It just
falls back to other stuff now.

~~~
mmastrac
It used to demand that Silverlight be installed before playing anything. It no
longer does, thankfully. That's what I meant.

EDIT: Argh, didn't take long to find an "install Silverlight" while browsing
through the HTML5 demos site:

[http://html5labs.cloudapp.net/WebSockets/ChatDemo/wsdemo.htm...](http://html5labs.cloudapp.net/WebSockets/ChatDemo/wsdemo.html)

Why do they keep doing this?

~~~
contextfree
IIRC, the Web Sockets implementation was something the WCF team was already
experimenting with for their own purposes and originally had not much to do
with IE9 or the IE team. Since it was implemented in WCF, obviously it would
require a CLR (i.e. Silverlight).

Putting it on the HTML5 Labs site is kind of goofy, and the whole HTML5 Labs
thing is sort of a dubious PR exercise to begin with, but I guess it does at
least show they're experimenting with the Web Sockets protocol.

------
tnorthcutt
_Exactly twelve months from the first Platform Preview of IE9, on Monday March
14th we will celebrate the developers and designers who are making a more
beautiful web for all of us. We will release the final version of Internet
Explorer 9 for download beginning at 9 p.m. Pacific._

 _twelve months_

 _twelve months_

 _twelve months_

~~~
tnorthcutt
I guess I earned the downvotes for the bad attitude. I'm just amazed that in a
time when everyone else is iterating and pushing out updates in a Big Hurry,
they're announcing (celebrating?) the fact that they took a year to go from
preview to release.

------
PatrickTulskie
It should have come out March 14th, 2009.

------
givan
that will be a sad day, another junk launched :(

~~~
ramki
if you don't like it, don't use it. But please don't be sad. Hope you are not
depending on ie's rendering engine.

~~~
rimantas
I don't use IE9 for my browsing and I am sad. I am a web developer and now we
will have 3 or 4 versions (depending on whether IE6 support is required) of
Microsoft browser to care for. And they all are outdated compared to Firefox,
Chrome, Opera, Safari.

~~~
ramki
sorry man, i don't know anything in web development. I'm a system programmer
works on C\C++ and hardly know internal details of browsers. But IE9 is very
cool(compared to ie8), i liked it. Thanks for making me aware of how newer
versions affects everyone.

