After an already long development path, Microsoft has just released the release candidate for Internet Explorer 9, their attempt at turning the tide. They’ve looked at an impressive 17000 pieces of feedback for the release candidate, and they made lots of changes.
There are a lot of changes under the hod. The release candidate adds support for CSS3 2D Transforms, HTML5 Geolocation, a set of HTML5 semantic elements, and the HTML5 canvas globalÂCompositeÂOperation property. They also improved the performance of CanvasPixelArray.
“The IE9 RC is faster with real world sites. In addition to making the script engine faster, we’ve improved and tuned the rest of the browser as well. You’ll find that Gmail, Office Web Applications, and many other sites are faster as a result of scenario tuning, network cache tuning, and new compiler optimizations,” details Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, “You’ll also find that the RC of IE9 often uses megabytes less memory than the beta because of changes like delayed image decoding. We’ve also improved the performance of things many people do every day, like find on page, and made improvements which extend battery life.”
Interface-wise, the biggest change is the addition of an option to display the tab bar on an additional row. Sadly, you can’t place these tabs atop the address bar where it belongs according to the Gospel Of Chrome (the One True browser interface). Another issue is the font rendering, which is still fuzzy due to the DirectWrite support. Why IE9 can’t just use my global font settings is beyond me. It might sound petty to some, but it’s frickin’ 2011 and I demand consistent font rendering. Whether it’s the fuzzy but shape-accurate Mac OS X variant, or the sharp but shape-inaccurate variant in Windows – they’re both fine as long as it’s an either-or thing!
You can download the release candidate today.
Has anyone heard about any WebGL plans from Microsoft?
If they don’t support it, I’m afraid we’re going to stay stuck with Flash (at least as a fallback) for a very long time…
I like it so far.
I wish the favorite’s bar had the glass theme like the the address bar and tab bar, though. Doesn’t seem to quite fit.
So far, it seems really snappy.
chrome 10: 244
ff 4 beta: 197
opera 11: 177
safari 5: 165
ff 3.6: 139
ie9rc: 116
ie8: 27
Don’t use html5test.com. It’s meaningless. It just checks that the browser claims to support groups of feature. It doesn’t actually check anything.
Yeah, I know. It is more an indication or intent.
How about an acid3-test: 95 out of 100 (same as beta). IE8 only got 20.
That is atleast something, a lot of support for a lot of CSS.
Edited 2011-02-10 20:41 UTC
Acid3 is indeed a real test. If only they’d fix it so it doesn’t require SVG fonts anymore. This part of the SVG spec has even recently been downgraded to non-normative, because everyone knows it’s broken. Its main effect has been to uselessly penalize Firefox (which refused to implement it).
html5test.com doesn’t even check for HTML5 features. For example, it scores points for h264 codec support, which is NOT part of HTML5.
PS: According to Ars
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/internet-explorer-9-r…
“Over the past year, we’ve seen SVG and canvas graphics, WOFF Web fonts, a whole bunch of CSS features, HTML5 <video> and more added to the browser.”
Let’s be very clear here … insofar as it goes, one has to really applaud Microsoft’s efforts to be standards-compliant with IE9. This is good news.
It is perhaps disappointing that XP users will be left out, but then again, XP users can use Firefox or Chrome and not be left out, so not a big issue even there.
Edited 2011-02-10 21:47 UTC
No text-shadow.
Incredible.
And no: border-image, flexible boxmodel, css columns, css gradients, CSS Transitions, webgl, History Management, applicationCache, IndexedDB, Web Workers.
But atleast we get inline SVG, hashchange, Drag and Drop, etc.
Atleast if I test on and compare with Firefox 4 beta:
http://www.modernizr.com/
Some I would have considered essential though. 🙁
I thought webworkers was promissed ?
Edited 2011-02-10 22:07 UTC
What’s most glaring is web pages render with the fuzzy text, but the IE9 interface appears has the sharp text.
It isn’t even consistent within the app.
You do know that Opera placed the tabs atop the address bar waaaay earlier than Google Chrome?
They introduced tabs in version 4.0, released June 2000:
http://files.myopera.com/Vectronic/OperaVersions/Opera4.02.png
Here, the tabs are on top, and the address bar is at the bottom of the page, but I do believe it could be moved to the top of the page in the preferences.
But even if it couldn’t, the addressbar was placed at the top of the page, right below the tabs, in version 5.0, released December 2000:
http://files.myopera.com/Vectronic/OperaVersions/Opera5.02.png
No biggie, but credit where credit is due..
Yes, but that wasn’t the default. I used Opera in those days, and iirc, you could MOVE them there, but it wasn’t the default.
I’ve been using Opera since 9.24, released about a year before the first release Chrome, and the tabs were definitely on top by default.
They were above the address bar originally. If I remember correctly, you couldn’t move them UNDER the bar (less you had it at the bottom of the screen)
But, that was a long time ago.
Well I can’t say for absolute certain how Operas tabbbar was placed by default in version 4/5 as I only started using Opera at version 7, but that version most definitely had the tabbar placed above the addressbar, by default. Just like Chrome, only waaay earlier still (January 2003).
Granted, Chrome was first to successfully remove the menus and move the tabs into the titlebar. But that’s another thing entirely.
no box-shadow, no transitions, slow as hell, jquery not working. no thanks, I’ll keep using chrome.
Err …
I am on the jQuery site with it, and it works fine.
As for slow, it isn’t as fast as chrome but hell of a lot faster than IE8.
Don’t know if it’s the proxy here at work but somehow IE9 seems to be having trouble downloading some images. I don’t have that issue with FF4.
I had to remove IE8 from my W7 installation, it was crashing badly, in a ways I’ve never seen in my 18 years computer experience. W7 Premium 32 bit installed on a pretty modern PC, IE was horror. I can’t update it, so I removed it. Happy with both Chrome and FF. They lost me completely, so no go for 9RC, I don’t really care if it’s better, I just don’t believe them.
Somebody actually modded this troll up.
You didn’t remove IE 8 from Win 7, it comes win IE 8. You just hid it.
It’s called KB2454826. While the description page doesn’t explicitly say that it fixes the font-rendering issue, it does mention “…a set of performance and functionality updates for graphics…”.
Furthermore, after installing the update, Firefox 4b8 with DirectWrite enabled (through about:config) started rendering light text on a dark background correctly (the text no longer looks as if it were bolded). If you haven’t already installed this update, I highly recommend you do so as it also provides updates for the MediaFoundation and XPS components of Windows 7.
For more info on the bug see:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1775755
To download the patch see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2454826