Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview: Investigated
by Brian Klug on March 17, 2010 11:44 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Standards Compliance
That aside, virtually everything else works the way you'd expect it to. The few number of sites I visited all appeared to load (minus a few script errors) without any obvious visual problems. Among the most intense of examples I frequent is newspond.com, which uses purely CSS to deliver what I think is one of the most haptic and interactive news aggregation websites around. It's a qualitative test, but I've found that it's surprisingly real-world.
Microsoft took a quick jab at the ACID web compliance tests during the MIX10 day 2 keynote, most notably the ACID 3 test, which it currently doesn't pass:
The IE team is busy working on making IE 9 Acid3 compliant, but noted that because the HTML5 spec is still evolving, they aren't focusing exclusively on just making IE 9 pass one test. During the keynote, Dean Hachamovitch noted, "some people use Acid3 as a shorthand for standard support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about 100 tails of about a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so... we will continue to make progress on the Acid3 test. The score will continue to go up as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."
There's something to be said for real-world testing and taking synthetic benchmarks with a grain of salt; it's something the GPU-testing community has known and practiced for years. To that extent, IE went ahead and developed its own testing suite, which you can find at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.
Dean illustrated a compelling example showing the CSS edge pattern rendering differences between the latest builds of Chrome, Firefox, and IE 9. Note as well the browser-specific prefixing required to get near the same border patterns:
Firefox 3.6 at left. Chrome (stable) at right.
IE 9 Platform Preview
This is something you can easily replicate for yourself using the latest browsers and the test pages noted previously.
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Sahrin - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Why would MS announce their colossal failure on Acid3 and then tweak to optimize for the GPU accelerated animation test?JonnyDough - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Dear Microsoft:We don't want you to control our computers. We want STANDARDS to control how our computers operate. STANDARDS that make things flow well and work together. Stop re-writing your crappy browser the way you know how and LEARN how to write it CORRECTLY, according to the standards that the industry has put in place. Error loading webpage alerts are not fun. K? Thnx. Bye bye.
DominionSeraph - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Yes, Microsoft; take your DirectX and shove it.And your .avi container? What a colossal failure that has been. I'd much rather have the industry standard .mp4, because it's not like that's just Apple's .mov or anything. Or as if .mkv is superior.
And Phil Katz's .zip? No! STANDARDS I say! LEARN how to write it CORRECTLY, according to the standards that the industry has put in place. That standard being.... uhhhhh.... never mind. Everyone just uses .zip as laid out in PKWARE's appnote.txt.
And filename extensions? GTFO. Because it's not like you just read this post.
Nataku - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
what in the h*** is the wrong with you... you didn't read the article did you?I wonder if this new browser will use dual gpu configurations well.
lotharamious - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I think that ball's is in Nvidia's and ATI's court.pvdw - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
It's been years since I've used IE as my main browser, but whether or not I choose to change, competition is great news for us - the users!This reminds me of Netscape's heyday, before MS killed them and progress stagnated till Opera/FF/Safari.
qwertymac93 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
i ran the flying images test and i got 16fps on opera 10.5 with 256 images, chrome could barely manage 2 fps with 64. firefox managed 6fps with 256 images, but apparently wasn't applying the gaussian blur filter it was supposed to, leading to jagged edges, this is probably why it performs so well...screens of opera, ff, and chrome(in that order)
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/6881/98089180.j...">http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/6881/98089180.j...
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/6569/30885682.j...">http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/6569/30885682.j...
http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/8895/29131277.j...">http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/8895/29131277.j...
chrome had the best quality, opera lower quality but much better speed(chrome was actually lower then 1fps), and firefox had the worst of both worlds, even worse quality then opera and one third the speed.
qwertymac93 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
i forgot to mention, opera had a weird flickering issue that turned half the screen dark gray every now and then. you can clearly see it in the screen.SpeedMan88 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I played around with this test and, as suspected, found that my graphics card driver settings such as anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and mipmap quality levels affected the quality of the rendered images. You should be able to get near perfect image quality by cranking up the quality in your graphics card drivers. Forcing 16x AF seemed to make the biggest difference for me.Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
"and claims it's at party with Firefox 3.6"Yeah baby. Like it's 1999.
;)