Hasta La Gadget!

Ninth time’s the charm, sometimes! At least that’s Microsoft’s hope with IE9, which they’ve just announced at Mix, brings new HTML5 support (including HTML5 video!), hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and a totally new JavaScript engine—and no XP support.

Microsoft’s just demoed the latest build of IE9, the final version of which doesn’t yet have a release date, and for something as sleepy as a browser, it’s pretty cool. Here’s what’s new:

HTML5

HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It’s magic! It’s going to save the internet! It’s going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it’s more subtle than that: It’s the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they’re talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn’t require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they’re drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer’s various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They’re finally trying, is the point.

The New JavaScript Engine

Modern web apps are loaded with JavaScript, to the point that new browsers are practically measured by how fast they can render it. (A faster JavaScript engine means sites like Gmail, Facebook and even Gizmodo don’t just load faster, but run more quickly.) Here’s how Microsoft says IE9 measures up right now:

Keep in mind that this is a WebKit-designed test, and that IE9 isn’t ready for release yet—Microsoft says they’ll still improve the rendering speed. And really, while IE9 might not outpace the fastest browsers out there, it’s at least close. And hilariously faster than IE8. In the onstage demo, IE9 didn’t do terribly well on the Acid3 test, either, scoring a mediocre 55/100, which they vowed to improve. But again, they’re at least trying, and when you’ve got the market share (and history of ignoring standards) that Microsoft does, this is, again, worth a lot.

2D Acceleration

Internet Explorer nine adds DirectX video acceleration for SVG graphics and even text rendering, which will make some SVG graphics and CSS3 rendering faster, but also applies to text rendering, which makes the entire browsing process a bit smoother.

HTML5 video rendering is much, much smoother than in Chrome (demonstrated onstage), simply because of Direct2D video rendering—Microsoft was able to demonstrate two 720p HD videos playing smoothly in the same browser window, while Chrome choked on just one. Getting this acceleration doesn’t require any extra code on the website’s part, though developers won’t be able to depend on this kind of video acceleration in their webpages, since it’s unique to IE9 and Windows, for now. More than allowing for absurd demos like this, what this means is that any video played back via the video tag in IE9 will simply use less CPU power than it would in another browser, which is an objective improvement. (Note: This won’t be available on Windows XP.)

Additionally, some Javascript rendering can also be offloaded to the GPU, which, again, helps speed along rendering and responsiveness for complicated web apps.

A lot of what Microsoft is doing here could be accurately described as catchup. And aside from the 2D acceleration features, there’s really not much new here, as far as your average browser is concerned. But Internet Explorer adoption is inevitable, and for Microsoft to embrace modern web standards—at least more than they have in the past—will have a measurable, positive effect on the internet, and the people who browse it. (From work, which I’m fairly sure is the only place where the computer-literate people use IE anyway.)

A Clean Break

It’s hinted on Microsoft’s IE9 site that some of the features of IE9 won’t be compatible with XP, and some commenters have told me the prerelease version doesn’t run on the aging OS. The truth, as confirmed by Mary Jo Foley, is more severe: IE9 will not support Windows XP.

A clean break at some point is inevitable, but this isn’t going to go over too well with the millions of XP loyalists still out there.

The Preview

You can actually try it now, though some of the features—most conspiciously HTML5 video—aren’t yet there, and the interface is still pretty barebones. (There’s no proper address bar, for example, but just a “go to” popup window. This is a developers’ test tool, really.) The download’s available here.

[Giz at Mix]

Microsoft is putting the finishing touches to the famed “browser choice screen” that the European Commission forced it to include as part of its antitrust investigation settlement, and today we get to see it for the first time. Users who have Internet Explorer as their default browser (meaning none of the savvy Engadget readers) will be alerted that there is “an important choice to make” and directed to the above decision making assistant. We actually think the randomized order of the top five browsers makes a ton of sense, and would express some cautious optimism that the ballot screen could really do its job of informing people of the alternatives out there. Users in the UK, Belgium and France will get to try it out next week, and a phased rollout will begin across Europe on March 1.

Windows 7’s European browser ballot screen revealed, rolling out next week originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Register  |  Microsoft Blog  | Email this | Comments

Autsch! In light of the recent attacks on Google China and Microsoft’s revelation that an Internet Explorer security flaw served as an impetus in the assault, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security has released a warning to its population: avoid IE. Specifically, the report calls out the latest three versions — 6, 7, and 8 — but let’s face it, those older versions should be avoided on grounds of usability alone. Boy, bet the Bonn-based agency is happy about that Windows 7 web browser ballot screen, eh?

Germany advises its citizens to say ‘nein’ to Internet Explorer originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Mashable  |  BSI  | Email this | Comments

In the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera all set new personal bests for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent respectively. This period marks the first time Chrome has beaten Safari to third spot, while their collective prosperity comes at the expense of IE, which continues to hemorrhage users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month. Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice might still look mighty, but projections from Net Applications suggest it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of this year. Unless something magical happens. You’ll probably also want to know that Net Applications monitors incoming traffic to over 40,000 websites and generates a sample size of about 160 million unique visitors each month — making the veracity of its claims pretty robust. One hidden sign of our collective laziness: 21 percent of all users last quarter were still fulfilling their browsing needs with IE 6. For shame.

Internet Explorer losing users as other browsers set share records originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Computer World  |  Net Applications  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on June 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

Windows XP/Vista only
As a web designer one of the things that is difficult to do is test a site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer, especially if you’re running Vista which doesn’t really include an option to run prior versions of IE. A significant amount of computer users still use Internet Explorer 6 as their main browser, and it renders sites rather differently than Internet Explorer 7. And then there’s Internet Explorer 8 which is currently in the Beta stage, and yet again that renders differently than any prior version.

To make things a little easier a nifty free application called IETester has been developed. With it you can test your website in Internet Explorer 5.5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 Beta. The best part is that the application has a tabbed interface (as seen above) so that you can quickly switch between website renderings in different versions of Internet Explorer.

A nice feature that I didn’t catch at first was that you can actually view them side-by-side by dragging one tab into the content area of another tab. It will “split” the window so that both tabs are next to each other, which is really handy.

I played around with the program for about 15 minutes, and it does what it’s advertised to do, but it definitely has some bugs. In that 15 minute period the application crashed three times on me, but I think I was pushing it too hard. I was trying to open multiple websites simultaneously using different versions of Internet Explorer, and it buckled under the pressure. So it’s obviously not designed to be a day-to-day browser, but it’s fine for testing a website here and there.

What I don’t get is why Microsoft doesn’t take matters into its own hands and start a project like this one. Web developers would probably still be bitter because of their non-compliance of standards in the past, but an application like this would help regain a little respect. We just need to keep our fingers crossed that Microsoft doesn’t go the opposite route and shutdown this project for redistributing the IE DLL’s.

Get IETester
Thanks to Yansky for the tip!

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