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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overzealot - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Definitely skip 9.11 though. It crashes.Is it too soon still?
DominionSeraph - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Opera 10.50 fixes every problem you had? Mine craps itself on webpages all the time. Some pages just won't finish loading; sometimes I'll lose the ability to interact with the page -- can't select text, and mouseovers on hyperlinks don't show the hand icon. It just locked up on me clicking on page 3 of these comments.When this happens, the program is still responsive, but the page is useless until refreshed.
I'm still using it. I like the screen real estate and I'm addicted to Speed Dial. But it's certainly not at an IE8 level of compatibility.
CptTripps - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
It amazes me how often people don't really look at the article and make stupid comments hoping everyone will hate MS as much as they do.haplo602 - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
omg owned ... I could not clearly read the last one in the chart, I guessed it's again some Chrome version (since they have 2 in there)./me hides in shame
teohhanhui - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Opera 10.50 is rightfully no. 1 (lower=better) in MS's chart.bobjones32 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
erm, yeah. What's he going on about? Opera 10.1 is in the chart. So is Opera 10.5. Microsoft isn't hiding or deliberately avoiding showing anything here.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Presentations are probably planned and SHOULD be planned, especially if you're MS. Think about it...Griswold - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Aye, pretty pathetic on MS' part. But hey, most people using IE arent even aware that there are alternatives, especially not the in every way superior opera.INeedCache - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I am well aware of the available browsers out there. IE8 works for me and I like it. Tell me, does the car you drive offer the best performance in it's price range? If not, why are you driving it? Not everyone is worried about squeezing the every drop of performance from every program on their computer.B3an - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
You guys are pathetic, not MS. So quick to bash MS you fail to see that Opera 10.5 IS there, and it's no.1