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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vol7ron - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Thank you for posting this, all of it. I was going to say something, but I thought, "why?" Some people are incorrigible.Omega215D - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
these Acid3 tests are pretty useless at gauging anything.kb9fcc - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Yeah, especially when your browsers come in dead last all the time...I saw an article yesterday at Redmond Channel Partners Online about how badly IE8 does up against a JavaScript test suite Google has called Sputnik. Unlike Acid3 which only has 100 tests, Sputnik has over 5000, all based on the standards. It would be interesting to see how IE9 does against Sputnik.
Oh, and no, Chrome didn't do the best. It places third with 218 errors. Opera did the best (78 errors) followed by Safari (159 errors), Firefox placed fourth (259 errors), and way out of the pack IE8 at 463.
The original article is here:
http://rcpmag.com/articles/2010/03/15/ie-8-finishe...">http://rcpmag.com/articles/2010/03/15/i...es-last-...
Sputnik can be found here:
http://sputnik.googlelabs.com/">http://sputnik.googlelabs.com/
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
The funny thing is that in general use, I've tried all of the major browsers (FF, IE8, Chrome, Opera, and Safari) and I always end up feeling Firefox does the best at consistently loading pages in a reasonably fast time. Opera and Chrome both feel sluggish on some of the Facebook pages (games) I visit, for example. That's the problem with benchmarks: companies optimize for benchmarks, but just because you're the fastest at, say, 3DMark doesn't make your hardware/software the fastest in real-world situations.yyrkoon - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Chrome feels sluggish ?I had to ditch Firefox, because it was *very* sluggish. I had been running Chrome for, oh, I do not know, about 8 months I guess, and was used to it's performance. Then, when I switched to Windows 7 Enterprise x64 ( Ultimate ), I had a problem with Chrome functioning properly. So, I did what I think any normal ( in the know ) user would do, and switched to Firefox. My god, was it terribly slow in rendering pages.
SO, I tried the latest beta on the off chance that it would work ok with Windows 7 x64 . . . and man, I have to tell you. It spanks the crap out of Firefox. Not even a problem so far.
Anyways, we all have our preferences, and no I am not trying to pander anything, but this has been my own experience. Personally, I am very glad Chrome is out there.
Oh, and sure, the occasional web page will not load right( but in the last 3 months, this has only been once ), but I have yet to determine whether that is a standards issue, or if the given pages are at fault. Really, I do not care, my experience has been that good.
vol7ron - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
A few years ago I was IE-only.Then, around the era of tabbed browsing, I began using Firefox.
With the bounty of add-ons that Firefox has, I've used it as my primary development browser, however Chrome is my new favorite for just viewing pages. Why? It's still a load-time issue. Firefox has so many useful add-ons that it takes forever to start up and load into memory; this undoubtedly will change once I get my hands on my first SSD, but until then, it takes too long to just "Google something real quick."
Chrome is so lightweight (even with the few add-ons I've installed) and it loads pages like a breeze.
medi01 - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
I've never cared about the speed, though it's pretty fast, but more about the features.Opera has far superior list out of the box features:
mouse gestures,
"undo" on closing pages (!!!)
custom search angines
storing favorites/custom search in opera repository (you make a bookmark at work and it shows up in all your opera's)
built-in ad blocker
As far as Firefox goes, it's the best one to use when developing web pages, or customizatin, but even it's tabs do not fully satisfy me, pages just keep poping up in a new browser window instead of tab, no matter what I do.
gavjof - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
CTRL Click. That will work ;)strikeback03 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Some of that must come down to individual installations, as open in new tab works fine for me. Also you can undo closing tabs in FF, not sure about whole windows.Nice to see Opera finally added a ad blocker
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
I like the mail client too. And emailing the page youre on with 2 clicks is useful also. But I really like being able to block ANY ad I see. And not just ads. I even block stuff like the Anandtech logo up at the top of the screen. lol. I dislike distractions.