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Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#61

Post by jf »

outofband wrote: post #48
rbanffy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows NT was designed to have "multiple personalities". It has a Win32 personality most Windows programs see, a POSIX personality (that I think doesn't exist anymore) and an OS/2 personality (that I never saw). Each one could run binaries designed for the respective environment. Few Windows programs ever touch the NT kernel. OSX is also modeled like this. There is a Mach kernel and a BSD-like personality on top of…

the posix personality still exists - it's called SUA; the Subsystem for UNIX Applications. the guys at interop systems have made a really nice ports-esque system for it so it's easy to get up and running with the usual pile of apps.

Do you have more details on this? I looked around for a while and ended up installing cygwin...

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#62

Post by grayrest »

tptacek wrote: post #46
percept wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could shorten their release cycle but it wouldn't change the behavior of their largest customers. Consider a large organization that finally installed IE7. [Welcome to 2006!] I'm sure we'll have to deal with this for years to come (unfortunately), and neglecting corporate customers leaves a lot of money on the table.

A thousand times this. I have clients who are site-wide IE6 to this day. Ironically, Firefox worsened this problem, because all those clients also allow you to run Firefox (because IE6 barely works), but have apps that require IE, so (a) there's little incentive to upgrade (just use Firefox!) and (b) it's still likely that your first visit from a user there will be from IE6. IE7 is also much easier to work with than…

When chrome frame gets officially greenlighted, I'm immediately dropping all IE 6-8 support and campaigning as hard as I can at work for them to do the same.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#63

Post by skar »

code_duck wrote: post #55
zepolen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I can't see why they don't stick an IE badge on webkit and be done with it.

I totally agree, I've many times pleaded the case that MS should just ditch Trident in favor of Webkit, and everyone would benefit.

I think it's like a turf war inside MS and the existing IE team managers wouldn't like to lose their position of strength and the no.of developers working under them.

Also the browser is taking up more of the OS capabilities, like threads, storage, GPU acceleration and so on. So MS would be reluctant to let the browser become too strong. But the horse has already bolted and there's always Linux, Android, Meego etc for the browser makers to cater for the netbook, tablet, smart phone markets.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#64

Post by Yaggo »

code_duck wrote: post #36
dstein wrote: post #24

I'm still trying to decide how I want to install it. Being able to test all versions of IE on a single machine is getting impossible. I have a Windows 7 virtual machine for testing IE8, a Vista vm for IE7, and an Windows XP for testing IE6. And I only have one license of each system, and I don't really want to drop my ability to test IE7 or IE8. Fuck you Microsoft!!

Do you know that Microsoft supplies VHD images for free that you can use to test any version of IE? YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software. They're intended to work only with Windows and Virtual PC (of course!) but apparently it's possible to get them to work with other VM software on other OSs. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...

> YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software.

Last time I checked, running "just Windows" requires "a license or something".

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#66

Post by bvi »

flatulent1 wrote: post #32

It seems like the tech sites that end up with mega-publisher owners are a bit soft in articles that cover products from major potential advertisers. Conde Nast owns Wired, arstechnica, webmonkey, and reddit Tabs to the side of the address bar? Using the URL space for search? What are they smoking? We'll see how standards support actually turns out...

As a user who regularly has 15+ tabs open simultaneously, this is the one reason I cannot see myself using IE9.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#67

Post by _b8r0 »

code_duck wrote: post #54
ciupicri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, but it seems that I can use them for only 2 weeks ("Expires October 1, 2010") or 90 days ("Expires 90 days after first run.").

They supply new ones every 90 days or so.

Which is great if you want to do completely unnecessary admin work every 90 days.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#68

Post by sireat »

If IE9 can handle multiple tabs better, I am all for it.

IE8 chokes on 20-30 tabs (mostly HN...) while I've have not had the same problem in Firefox, Chrome or Opera, IE just feels sluggish.

I should clarify, that I can crash or slow down to crawl Firefox (I am looking at you Reddit), but then it is obvious something has gone wrong.

The way IE slows down is less obvious, that is you can still use it but it is slow.

IE8 is trying to degrade gracefully and failing.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#69

Post by tsotha »

code_duck wrote: post #37
InclinedPlane wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please stop bashing MS for the continued usage of IE6? For it's time IE6 was a fine browser (honest), and what exactly is so bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete? If you're tired of supporting IE6 on your site, then stop. Foisting off the cost of transitioning everyone off IE6 onto a big company like MS is comforting but ultimately unrealistic and selfish.

What's bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete is that it encourages people who know very little to think it is perfectly legitimate to continue using it long after it is obsolete. It's their lousy software, it IS their responsibility to transition people off of it.

I think it is perfectly okay for people to use obsolete software that does the job. You can always drop support for browser versions you don't want to support, but I think it's bad business and also a bit rude to try to dictate what software potential customers will use.

IE6 is still perfectly serviceable for the vast majority of the tasks web browsers are put to.

Re: Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game

#70

Post by pilif »

Eager to look into the future that will bring the demise of countless of hours of patching up sites so they also work in IE (the code you write works perfectly in all browsers - just IE always needs that additional hassle), I downloaded the beta, went to a Site I was working on (it is valid HTML5) and poof

http://www.gnegg.ch/muchbetter.png

error -2147467259

right. Maybe it tells me at least where that happened.

Line 1 character 1. Yeah. Thanks.

I have a feeling that even with all the good intentions, this browser will be as buggy as all the other IE versions before this one. This time though, as it won't run under XP, it's just one more version we have to write workarounds for.

Thanks.

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