Microsoft Updates IE 9 Preview, Boosts HTML5 Support

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Microsoft’s next generation browser is now in Platform Preview3. With each new preview, Microsoft introduces new features and improvements. In true Microsoft style, no hard release date has been disclosed for the public beta or final version.

The third preview released Wednesday introduces support for HTML5's Canvas element -- the tag lets site designers insert dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images into pages -- as well as for hardware-accelerated audio and video tags.
Microsoft has pinned IE9's attempt to match or surpass the speeds of rivals on the browser's ability to offload text, image and video rendering chores to the computer's graphics processor, dramatically increasing performance.
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MS has stated major IE releases would be on a 2 year schedule. Since a beta isn't available yet, it doesn't look like that will happen. It took 2.5 years between IE7 and IE8 and the time between IE8 beta to final was a year. IOW, breath holding time isn't here yet.

I'm hoping there will be a beta by the end of summer.
 
What always amazes me is that Mozilla is basically a group of volunteers (for the most part) with some paid folk in the mix developing a web browser.

Microsoft is a huge company with people making mad cash (ok, maybe not quite as much as they used to but the point holds: they're not doing it as volunteers for shits and giggles) as developers and coders for IE and it still takes them so incredibly long to create a browser.

Can it really be so tough to write a piece of code that takes data coming in (the HTTP/etc streams) and "decodes" it to display the content in a window - the basic function of all web browsers? Really?

If it is, damn, I'm sure as hell happy I never got into programming. :) I just don't get why it takes so long to create a web browser, I really don't. Guess that's a good thing, actually.
 
Lets just say I "might" have a friend who works at Microsoft, and lets just say he "might" be using IE9 on an early build of Windows 8, and I "might" have found out that IE9 is very good.

But if anyone asks, he infact did not say those things :ninja:
 
Bahamut said:
What always amazes me is that Mozilla is basically a group of volunteers (for the most part) with some paid folk in the mix developing a web browser.
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LOL, no. Mozilla Corp rakes in tens of millions a year from ad revenue sharing and has a very much paid staff of core developers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

No doubt Mozilla is more efficient, but FF and Gecko are hardly being primarily developed by some unpaid community.
 
The fundamental problem is that MS still treats the browser as if it should be a static platform like windows, not a constantly moving target closing in on various standards. The logic is that you shouldn't have to worry about anything breaking because the browsers functionality changes with each months patch. That was not an unreasonable attitude when none of the rivals had enough market share to matter, but now rivals steadily chewing into their market-share the extremely long delays between new versions is hurting them badly as they continue to hemorrhage users from a browser taht is increasingly behind all its competitors. Meanwhile the steady stream of betas and previews well before each new version is released mean that competitors have plenty of time to see where MS will be and steal any thunder that the new version of IE could potentially have. Unless and until this finally sinks in to the Remond management and they begin doing major releases on a yearly or faster basis this isn't going to change. I

I suggest yearly because it would let them use yearly version naming. While IE6 doesn't immediately scream obsolete to a PHB or to Joe Sixpack IE 2001 is another story entirely.
 
It works great now, Preview3 finally enables HTL5 Youtube

It could be better than Chrome6.0447 or FireFox64 v3.7a6 but it needs tabs to be usable dammit!
 
P10-17000 said:
It works great now, Preview3 finally enables HTL5 Youtube

It could be better than Chrome6.0447 or FireFox64 v3.7a6 but it needs tabs to be usable dammit!
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This is by design. The previews are intended for web developers to test their sites against, not for actual use by end users.
 
^ Following that, I'm very interested in seeing where MS takes IE, in terms of a user interface. :)
 
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