IE9 is now under development!

Community
21

IE has had a built in update mechanism since before the Mozilla open cource project started (which led to phoenix/firebird/firefox).

When Microsoft set the trigger to automatically upgrade IE6 to IE7 they got so many complaints about broken code that they had to turn it off. There are too many intranet sites that specifically require IE6 and which will not work on any other browser.

The problem has been that it was difficult for companies to have IE6 for their intranet and the latest version of IE for internet use and so their staff have been forced to use IE6 for everything. Windows 7 fixes that problem and so as companies upgrade to Windows 7 they should be able to set things up to use IE6 for their intranet and IE8 (or 9 when it is ready) for the internet.

22

I could really care less which browser is more secure and better to use. As long as the features for development are improved drastically in IE9 (pretty much up to where webkit is as of now) then the development possibilities will be endless.

Think about all the hidden gems that are supported, almost, in all the other popular browsers: Rounded Corners, CSS3 Selectors, CSS Grids and Columns, CSS Gradients and RGBA, CSS Transformations, Multiple and Border Backgrounds, Canvas, Video and Audio. Now imagine if IE9 supported everything, then there would be an entirely new list of proprietary browser features that would further push the envelope.

Its only actually recently (within the past two years) that the list of features that was mentioned above has actually made its way into the browser arms race. But imagine if those features were supported a couple years back by all browsers. Then there would be an even more advanced series of hidden gems out for grabs.

If you can imagine how war can influence the advances in technology, but, instead, just think about browsers. Once again, if there wasn’t such a huge gap in development features (IE compared to all others) and if IE didn’t have such a large market share, then who knows what kind of awesome development gems and websites, applications, and tools would be created.

Not to mention all the compound and pseudo inventions that are used by clever developers - like for example CSS arrows. Now if there was a border-arrow css property then there wouldn’t have been a need create that, but since those tools do not exist, developers have had to think outside the box. Just think about what the possibilities would be if all the CSS features were available.

Its great that IE is finally (somewhat) catching up, but, yes, I do agree that its a good three or four years behind where it should be.

23

Now the real battle for the web browsers have started … I think other web browsers should start developing or add extra attributes to their browsers…

24

It’s not just IE6. I am currently working with someone that cannot upgrade 7 -> 8 because of internal apps and IT policy. I also recently had someone refuse to upgrade 7-> 8 (personal project, knew the guy etc, but why I cannot understand).

@raffles, I agree, but it’s simply budget. I get no complaints about Firefox 1 or 2, I do get complaints about IE6 and 7.

25

I just hope they finally update their JavaSCript to at least support nice things like Array.forEach and of course the more ancient things like addEventListener and passing the event object as an argument!!

Just basic w3c stuff, instead of the constant object detection, would be nice.)

@hash, that’s generally because Firefox has built-in updating mechanism’s, and has a more technically minded user base than IE.

I know a lot of people who refuse to update from FF2 because despite the security and bug fixes, FF3 came with a lot of extra garbage. Can it be removed? Probably, but we’re lazy and don’t want to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to “fix” an “awesomebar”. Seriously, that name is pants.

I could really care less which browser is more secure and better to use. As long as the features for development are improved drastically in IE9 (pretty much up to where webkit is as of now) then the development possibilities will be endless.

I’m not a feature-creature. I don’t need jazz in my browsers. As a developer, I want consistency. I want the same code to work the same way cross browser, device independent. I would never trade rounded corner bloat for protection against, say, clickjacking (tho sure, it would be ideal to have both).

If you can imagine how war can influence the advances in technology, but, instead, just think about browsers. Once again, if there wasn’t such a huge gap in development features (IE compared to all others) and if IE didn’t have such a large market share, then who knows what kind of awesome development gems and websites, applications, and tools would be created.

Interesting idea, though for some reason war with software seems to not always favour the better software. Instead, war of the browsers gave us conflicting specifications. IE sure was busy in the beginning with their own versions of… just about everything. It’s not just that they fell behind, but also that they had a ton of extra features that were IE-only. More like a fork than a lag.

So clearly, we need a steel-fisted dictator who can force everyone to react to x in y manner. Not that pansy “let’s make a small suggestion” W3C, but jack-booted thugs on the ground webstandardista religious hardline theocracy, run by a maniacal, paranoid Ayatolla who knows how to get things done.
Maybe a shadowy figure will rise through the secret ranks at Opera, will break out in a surprise attack, take over, and bring MS (and gecko and webkit) to its knees… and force them to switch over to Presto.
To alleviate MS’ fear that people will blame them for bugs they don’t understand or can’t fix, their humiliating takeover will be made very, very public.

Muhahahahha…

26

great, i hate ie8, and would like to change it

27

This is good news, glad to see activity out of Microsoft’s IE dev team.

Alex

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I’m not sure what’s going on in M$ but I think they finally got a guy who’s making it RIGHT! Honestly though, putting IE9 in development is way too early! Hack, I’m still in IE7 and no desire to move on to 8. I think they should put that development as part of patch to IE8. Having constant release like these could have a negative impact. Do they really want IE 10 and it’s still broken browser? Anyways, just glad that they have some people who knows what they are doing.

Another point. As some of you may rejoice new version of IE but I’m pretty sure that any popular JS framework groups are probably terrified what they have done and hopefully it’ll be backward compliant.

29

Too early? Do you want IE8 to become like IE6 - inactive for a long time?

30

I agree with PowerStrike. IE6 was a great browser at the time when it was developed - the problem was with the lack of updates thereafter. I’m just glad to see Microsoft’s back to work.

Alex

31

IE should really be up to at least version 12 by now. They need to churn out the upgrades as quickly as possible if they ever hope for their browser to catch up.

By not allowing any one version to remain current for too long they will hopefully avoid the problem of IE6 being repeated. From what I can see IE8 is now the most popular version of IE with IE6 now down to second place. We should soon be able to forget all about IE7. Presumably once IE9 appears it will take over reasonably quickly from IE8. Bringing out IE9 will not add a fourth version of IE that we need to support because by then IE7 will be dead.

32

Exactly. I don’t know how we can look at this in anything but a positive light as developers.

Alex

33

That blog article is a joke, really… it explains that Microsoft are attempting to use hardware to help assist rendering, but that’s not really the issue, the focused rendering engines from Google, WebKit, Opera and Mozilla on JavaScript are already primed to such a point where they do the job well (without letting the browser start sapping our system resources further). Ironic that the current build of IE9 is shown to have a less effective rendering speed than the others in the chart though! The main issue of latency is with the downloading of the files (due to Internet speeds on handheld devices or sizeable pages and applications rather than rendering).

They also make a big thing about their standards support and while Acid isn’t an explicit measurement of how standards compliment a browser is, the fact their almost bragging about their current score makes me want to laugh (really), it’s a well established fact that all of the other major rendering engines not only perform better but they have a better level of support for CSS3. It’s good their trying to do a better job but that particular post is pretty flawed and doesn’t give me much hope that IE9 will do much to address some of the still existent flaws in performance / functionality with IE8 and below (though at least IE8 supports CSS 2.1 to a high level).

Just as an example of how fluffy that article is…

Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today.

Shame that both Firefox and Webkit are implementing (and do so currently with Canvas) WebGL, which expressly renders hardware-accelerated content (bound with OpenGL through JavaScript) without the need for plug-ins. Granted this is currently aimed at rendering graphics, but it isn’t far off being able to be used for other elements of the page. I think Dean Hachamovitch is trying to make bold claims which are only technically or logically accurate if you live in a fantasy world. :slight_smile:

34

ROFL. What more can we expect from MS?

Haha.

Alex

35

The main difference is that people using Firefox, Opera or Safari are generally quick to upgrade, so there are relatively few people using older versions. Partly that’s because they are more likely to be a little bit tech-savvy and therefore keen to upgrade, and partly because other browsers make it much easier to upgrade. They have better auto-update systems, and are less likely to have higher system requirements (although Firefox did break that rule with v3).
For example, on my site, over 90% of Firefox users are using a version released in the last 10 weeks … whereas less than half the IE users are on 8.0, which is 8 months old now.

Another factor is that older versions generally lack support for particular advanced features, rather than completely break the entire damned layout, which IE6 is somewhat famous for.

36

I’m just jaded and bitter :slight_smile: I think mostly because of the demise of xhtml (read xml) (and I blame MS for killing it).

37

Depends on the page I guess.

Safari 3 (as I hear it from mac people) is still in use despite the release of safari 4… and I stil don’t know if Saffy 4 lets you do callbacks in .replace() in javascript but I hope so.

Anyway on pages using a certain technique (such as adjacent selector hovering) I need to test Saffy 3 and 4 separately.

On pages using display: inline-block I need to test FF2 as well as 3. Whenever FF4 comes out I might still be needing to test for FF2.

If anything looks a little off in Opera first thing I do is open 9.27, the oldest Opera I managed to keep.

Nope, I still need to test in multiple versions of browsers, and it’ll get worse when I really get into some funky Javascripting (libraries aside since I know they’re built around browser compliance in general). Hash is right in that regard, but I don’t see it as a bad thing that IE9 is on its way. It would be terrible if each new IE needed as many specific hacks as 6 and 7 needed, but since IE8’s almost at the door of the other browsers, I’m okay with it.

Plus the more “versions” behind you are with software, the easier it is for IE departments to convince the boss that an upgrade is needed:

“Sir, we need to upgrade our software. We’re using Internet Explorer 5 and the current version is 9. And our Outlook 98 is over 10 years out of date.”

“Uh, can’t we just install that, whatsit, Netscape? The one with the dinosaur?”

“Mozilla, sir.”

“Whatever. What about that?”

“We’d have to run Firefox 2 which is also no longer supported. Firefox 3 won’t run on Windows 98. All of our office software has had Microsoft support stopped for the past few years. We need change.”

“Are you saying we need to pull an Obama?”

“Yes we can.”

38

Great to see Microsoft want to compete with other browser.
Hope a best one win.

39

Hope a best ones win. Biodiversity is safer against various attacks : )

40

Dear IE Team, if you fail to deliver a browser that is up to today’s standards of Google Chrome, please do not release it. Make that a goal.