The most positive thing that came out of that keynote was that they focused on talking about achieving feature and performance parity with competing browsers, not adding useless features like Accelerators and Web Slices.
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#22Regarding hardware-accelerated drawing of text: I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially a "game" running on top of DirectX, no? Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming you had a good card with good…
As I understand it, GDI+ does software rendering into a window buffer which then gets hardware-composited by DirectX. Direct2D now does hardware-accelerated rendering and compositing.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861344.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/directx/archive/2009/09/29/comparing-d...
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#23Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
I suspect the other replies are way off base. Legal concerns are probably the largest blocker by far. Apple and Google don't have enterprise customers for WebKit, but Microsoft has many for IE. Since buying Microsoft software is effectively like buying job-insurance for IT staff, Microsoft's risk accounting is wildly different from Apple and Google. I'm not saying deciding not to use WebKit is the right risk/reward trade off, but IANAL.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#24Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
Control and influence. Backwards compatibility. And they probably still believe they can do it better.
I'm not sure that they can't. Give Microsoft a compelling business reason to build a great browser that also supports IE 8,7, and 6 rendering modes, and I bet they'll do it.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#25Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
I suspect the other replies are way off base. Legal concerns are probably the largest blocker by far. Apple and Google don't have enterprise customers for WebKit, but Microsoft has many for IE. Since buying Microsoft software is effectively like buying job-insurance for IT staff, Microsoft's risk accounting is wildly different from Apple and Google. I'm not saying deciding not to use WebKit is the right risk/reward t…
What do you mean by "enterprise customers" for IE? I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#26Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Control and influence. Backwards compatibility. And they probably still believe they can do it better.
I'm not sure that they can't. Give Microsoft a compelling business reason to build a great browser that also supports IE 8,7, and 6 rendering modes, and I bet they'll do it.
Isn't reclaiming the 20-30% market share they lost to Safari/Firefox/Chrome reason enough?
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#28Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
IE is deeply integrated within windows. Rewriting everything for webkit may be costly.
If I recall correctly there's some weird incestuous relationship in the HTML rendering in Outlook, Word and IE.
I agree it's almost definitely technically infeasible.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#29Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?
Nothing but time can kill IE6. Just wait another five years.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the other replies are way off base. Legal concerns are probably the largest blocker by far. Apple and Google don't have enterprise customers for WebKit, but Microsoft has many for IE. Since buying Microsoft software is effectively like buying job-insurance for IT staff, Microsoft's risk accounting is wildly different from Apple and Google. I'm not saying deciding not to use WebKit is the right risk/reward t…
What do you mean by "enterprise customers" for IE? I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
People who have written IE only, active-x infested applications are the "enterprise customers" of IE :)