Thread: Internet Explorer 9: An Early Look

Internet Explorer 9: An Early Look

03.16.10

We finally got to take an early version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 browser engine out for a spin.

In early testing, IE9 impresses.

by Michael Muchmore

Speed and standards. Those two words sum up the goals of Microsoft's just-released Platform Preview of its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser. I have to stress that there's a good reason for calling it a "platform preview" rather than a "beta"—the code you can download from ie.microsoft.com/testdrive is not a full browser program by a long shot—there's no Back button, let alone bookmark manager, history feature, toolbars, or any of the other features we've come to expect in modern Web browsers. So this hands on will be shorter than most, simply because there's not much in the way of "user interface" or other goodies to talk about. But there's still plenty to look at in terms of performance and standards support. And, from what we can see so far, it looks like Microsoft is on the right track.

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The first thing you notice (beside download links) when you go to the home page for the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview are links to speed and standards tests both from Microsoft and from the outside world. That's noteworthy, since the previous versions of the browser weren't known for speed or adherence to standards. So, that's a hopeful sign. And, in fact, the first results of my testing yielded impressive advances over Internet Explorer 8 in both performance and standards support. Most sites load more snappily than in IE8, and in some cases than in IE's competitors. But this engine can't claim top honors in performance and standards support just yet. Chrome and Opera still lead on a popular JavaScript benchmark, and Firefox supports more HTML 5, at the moment.

Internet Explorer 9: Speed
Microsoft is attacking performance on a few fronts in Internet Explorer. Not only has Microsoft's team rewritten the JavaScript engine to bring that subsystem's performance in line with that of competing browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, but they're using a second core in multicore CPUs (pretty much every PC sold today has a multicore CPU) to compile JavaScript in parallel. Granted, other browsers have done a tremendous job with JIT (just-in-time) compilation of JavaScript, but using the second CPU core is a new twist that makes a lot of sense, and it benefits from Microsoft's knowledge of Windows 7's use of multiple cores.

The standard test that tech reviewers use is the WebKit open source project's SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. But a few caveats are in order before anyone takes the results on these tests as the gospel on JavaScript performance. Even some of the most commonly called-upon JavaScript commands are not included in the tests. But they do show something about performance—anyone who's used Chrome knows it's significantly faster than IE7, and its SunSpider number is an order of magnitude faster. All that said, here are my results, using a 2-GHz Athlon AMD 64 X2-based PC with 2GB RAM, with all unnecessary processes shut down via Task Manager.

Browser SunSpider JavaScript
Benchmark result
(in milleseconds—lower is better)
Firefox 3.6 1,405
Google Chrome 4.0 749
Internet Explorer 7 47,119
Internet Explorer 8 9,015
Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 1,310
Opera 10.5 577
Safari 4.0 790
As you can see, the improvement from IE7 to IE8 to IE9 is remarkable. While Chrome, Opera, and Safari still lead by a good margin, the number-two browser Firefox is now in IE's rear-view mirror.

But there's more to performance than SunSpider. The Testdrive site for IE9 has a slew of demos that show fast, smooth performance for things like resizing fonts, zooming around maps, and "pulsating bubbles." This speed boost comes from Internet Explorer 9's use of graphics hardware to accelerate image and display operations. The map test uses Bing Maps, but I also tried Google Maps in IE8, IE9, and the current SunSpider leader Opera, as well as in Google's own Chrome browser. The IE9 preview did indeed handle satellite maps and text labels faster than the competition.

One of the most impressive demonstrations of IE9's hardware acceleration is the Flying Images test. Here, 3D icons spin in formation, and the tester can increase the number of icons, their size, and their speed. IE9 consistently maintained above 60 frames per second refresh rate, while SunSpider leader Opera slowed down to 15 fps when I increased the number of icons and zoomed in. One test tool I was sorry to see not included in the test site was one that timed the top 15 or so most popular JavaScript commands; at Microsoft's campus I noted that IE9 was twice as fast as Opera on this. I would really have liked to be able to replicate these results for myself.

Internet Explorer 9: Standards Compliance
A big thrust of Internet Explorer 9 is support for some emerging HTML 5 standards. High on everybody's lists among these are support for the Video and Audio tags. These tags allow playing of those media types directly from the browser, as opposed to needing a plug-in such as Adobe's Flash Player to do so. An advantage to Microsoft's implementation over that in Firefox is that IE9 will support industry-standard MPEG-4 and H.264, rather than the laudably royalty-free but little-used Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats supported by Firefox. It's noteworthy that the dominant leader in Internet video, YouTube, uses H.264 in its HTML 5 test site.

Unfortunately, this first build of IE9's platform doesn't yet implement the HTML video, audio, or canvas tags. The last one allows drawing within a Web page, and is already supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Another problem with support for these tags: A lot of sites test for your browser, so if they see you're using Internet Explorer (any version), you get an alternate page telling you that your browser doesn't support HTML 5 video, even if it does. Microsoft's IE general manager, Dean Hachamovitch (who Lance Ulanoff interviewed on video), hopes developers will start testing for the capability, rather than for the browser, so that content will work across browsers. —next: SVG Video >

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361444,00.asp

Cool, I'll keep an eye on this one. I think Microsoft got the idea that they needed to slim things down from the fiasco of Vista.

Microsoft: IE9 Won't Support Windows XP, Period

03.17.10
by Michael Muchmore

Windows XP users will not be able to run the final version of Internet Explorer 9, according to Microsoft executives, cutting out a decade-old, yet still popular operating system.

In fact, the Windows IE9 Platform Preview, as well as the final version, won't run on anything but the latest Microsoft operating systems. Users trying to run the preview code on an XP system will receive the following dialogue box: "Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview does not support any operating system earlier than Windows Vista SP2."

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MoreAnd of course, don't even think about versions for non-Windows operating systems. IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch told us that Mac and Linux versions weren't currently in the company's plans.

The reason IE9 doesn't work in XP is that it uses the Direct2D feature of DirectX when accessing the graphics hardware to accelerate image creation and drawing. Direct2D was introduced in Windows 7, but then added to Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. But not to WIndows XP.

When I asked the IE9 team about their plans for the legacy OS, they confirmed that XP was not in the cards:

"Windows XP users have a fast, safe, reliable and private browser in Internet Explorer 8," company representatives said in an emailed statement. "As the Web has continued to change in everything from security to the future HTML5 applications developers are starting to build today, browsers should require the modern graphics and security infrastructure that has come along since 2001. Internet Explorer 9 requires the modern graphics and security underpinnings that have come since 2001, and is intended to be run on a modern operating system in order to build on the latest hardware and operating system innovations."

It only makes sense the the OS vendor wants to give people as many reasons to upgrade their PCs to Wnidows 7 as possible, and not spend developer man-hours updating software that debuted nine years ago. Still, this probably won't make XP loyalists smile. They may even jump ship to fast browsers that do run on their platform – like Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361485,00.asp

Thanks for this, JD!

Running Vista x64 Home Premium, and haven't had nor seen the issues people whined about. It has been even more stable than XP, which was pretty darn good, All my older stuff runs fine. Some real old entertainment software isn't compatable with the 64 bit part of the OS, since the older stuff is 16 bit. Although some folks have made compatability loaders so you can load real old stuff and it will work.

Originally Posted by Hylander_1314

Running Vista x64 Home Premium, and haven't had nor seen the issues people whined about. It has been even more stable than XP, which was pretty darn good, All my older stuff runs fine. Some real old entertainment software isn't compatable with the 64 bit part of the OS, since the older stuff is 16 bit. Although some folks have made compatability loaders so you can load real old stuff and it will work.

Thank you Hylander! Vista is great if you have the memory. This laptop I'm using I bought the day Vista came out (by accident, I wanted XP) and it came with 512mb of memory. That is not enough. I discovered that using 2g ram makes Vista run so much better. I upgraded last week from 1.5g unmatching pairs (toshiba 512 and kingston 1g) to 2 matching PNY 1g sticks for a total of 2g. The dual channels really help.

As far as IE9, I started using Firefox a couple of years ago and will never go back. It's secure, and there are tons of add-ons like AdBlock that stop annoying ads on websites. Chrome is the fastest but I used it and discovered a major security flaw after a chrome related virus infected my system. It took me a week to get rid of every trace of the virus, then got rid of Chrome.

Hi,
you can see the whole preview of IE9 at the link given below.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives ... 9-preview/

Thank you.



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