51–60 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was it, thanks for the clarification. I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...
Considering the politics of such a large company, they're lucky if they only have two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope, Outlook now uses the Word rendering engine, since it's part of the Office family. Totally makes sense right?
That was it, thanks for the clarification. I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...
Regarding 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…
The part of the post about the font rendering is BS anyway. The picture is supposed to show "sub-pixel positioning" and it only shows antialiasing (not even sub-pixel antialiasing) which as you've pointed out isn't handled by a browser anyway. "Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes up so it can position t…
A true vector placement of each character gives you the ability to show type at any subpixel offset and then anti-alias, and I think there's a good chance they're doing this.
See this Loop/Blinn paper for more details: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.
Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon. OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit? I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe). See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have he…
Do I get more denial-groupthink downvotes with this one?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't reclaiming the 20-30% market share they lost to Safari/Firefox/Chrome reason enough?
They're trying to support more standards -- by definition, they're just reinventing the work others have already done. So it's grunt work, only useful for their future influence and power. They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
Just think how hard it would push webkit/mozilla/chrome if they did manage to beat them on speed. It would push them to get even better. Compeition is always good as long as 2 or more projects stay alive.
Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
Is it still conspiracy theory to suggest that they are the ones with the most to lose from a universally reliable JS and HTML implementation, so they should want to do enough to keep IE competitive, but not enough to make it fully compatible with everyone else?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the politics of such a large company, they're lucky if they only have two.
You'd be right about that. There's another one in the Media Center division, and it happens to be much more strict with respect to standards, although perhaps not as full-featured.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.
Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon. OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit? I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe). See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have he…
Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major products and access to give feedback to people who care.
Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil', just the inertia of a huge company).
You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did show how IE8 is orders of magnitude slower than its competitors - that display of honesty shocked me a little.
They admit the flaws when the next version is about to come out. Standard operating procedure for marketing.
Had it been a "minor improvement" over IE8 and were it aimed squarely as a competitor to Chrome or Firefox, I would doubt it would ever launch. Just preventing companies from rewriting internal web apps to be more cross-browser-friendly would be sufficient accomplishment.
:( still no canvas or svg... jerks.
No mention on if they actually, truly, really support transparent PNGs this time around, either. (If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent PNG....)