Hardware
I'm looking forward to IE9
Microsoft has named the date for the first beta of its successor to Internet Explorer 8. You'll be able to download beta code for IE9 on September 15, the company said Thursday. Microsoft told The Reg that it's not releasing code to MSDN subscribers in advance, followed by everybody else. Microsoft is planning to formally …
IE is the world's most used, not popular, but used browser, so let's see what's in my crystal ball here...
September 16th - Hax0rz write naff little trojan/malware to break it.
September 17th - Every cack-handed little script kiddie and scumbag starts running malware on websites
September 20th - Media goes nuts proclaiming IE is still broken
September 21st - MS deny problem
September 22nd - MS annouce date for full release
November 1st - Full release out...vulnerability still present!
The cycle of life is complete and round the merry-go-round we all go again...
Slower than even bloated old Firefix, which is rather impressive, as I didn't think anything could be as bloated and crappy as Firefix, but IE9 even with it's much touted hardware acceleration seems to have still managed it.
http://i37.tinypic.com/setv89.png
Of course Chrome and Opera are way off in the distance in the performance stakes as usual.
In typical Microsoft style, they are papering over the cracks of a crappy product with slick marketing and nice sounding words like "standard compliance" and "hardware acceleration",
..IE8 _IS_ most-standards-compliant* by default. You only _NEED_ the extra header to force IE7 rendering instead of most-standard-compliant
http://dorward.me.uk/www/ie8/
And yeah, border-radius works
*I can't call it "standards compliant" really :P
The meta tag is necessary to stop (L)users from setting their IE8 into IE7 mode (or idiot IT departments setting a policy). IE8 has two engines; the ok but nothing special IE8 engine, and the bug-ridden IE7 engine for "incompatibility" mode to render shite, broken websites the same as IE7.
Properly coded website *may* be incorrectly rendered by IE8 in IE7 mode so you *have* to use the meta tag to ensure your site works.
Will this poxy nightmare continue? I can hardly be arsed to bother downloading the beta as we all know it'll be the same old shit that Redmond always turns out.
The difference in the JavaScript engines is negligible.. but if you go to their preview site and run some of the apps in there that will also run in compatible browsers, you will see the hardware acceleration makes IE a helluva lot faster than FF or Chrome.
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/PsychedelicBrowsing/Default.html
On FF 3.5 I get 36 revs/min. On IE9 preview I get 1850 rev/min.