Rather condescending from Dean Hachamovitch I think. I blogged more about it here: http://thedailyt.com/2009/11/one-more-internet-explorer-to-w...
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#92This is good. The end-users/web devs will benefit. We have more options, more competition and hopefully better browsers because of the competition.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#93> "perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites" Geee, I wonder why? Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any other major browser????
Eh, I don't buy that. I've got a client site that does fade-in/fade-out effects on multiple simultaneous elements, ajaxyness, and horizontally scrolled lists of images. It also uses jquery-like css selectors to target elements, and it intelligently re-renders (in realtime) selected page elements when the page is resized.
I can do all of that in IE 6, 7, or 8, without maxing out a CPU core.
What I can't do, and really would like to do, is offload more of the page rendering to Javascript, and the only reason I can't do that is because of the various noscript users out there.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least it's almost as fast as the slowest competitor...
Yeah, I love how they say IE is no longer an "outlier." They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
Also, Firefox already gets snippy with Webkit because they bail on dealing with difficult corner cases (the page showing the HTML5 spec itself being a recent example), then trumpet how fast they are. Let's see how fast IE9 is when it actually supports the standards properly.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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....)
that's a bug in their implementation of opacity, not of png. they don't support existing alpha in their opacity calculations.
Whoops, you're right. I hadn't really read in-depth when I ran into this several months ago, and I was rather peeved at the time regardless.
It doesn't really matter though - the point is, they still have a long way to go before they can earn back the trust they've squandered amongst the web development community.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#96Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers and other OS bits and parts. No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think…
Problem is, a lot of custom software depends on ActiveX controls and other plugins that work in IE but not anywhere else. Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have significant usage - at least within companies. Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one sponsored by Apple.
Right, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces, but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-) (indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would celebrate!