IE9 running on Windows 7

Microsoft has announced it will push Internet Explorer 9 out to Windows users everywhere starting at the end of June 2011. Thus far IE 9 is only available in Windows Update to those that used the IE 9 beta or RC releases.

We’ve proclaimed many times that the release of Internet Explorer 9 is great news for web developers, not because web developers use IE 9, but because other people will.

While IE 9′s HTML5 support still lags behind its competitors, it’s much better than IE 8. IE 9′s improved standards support and speedier rendering engine mean developers can start using HTML5, CSS 3 and APIs like Geolocation with more confidence.

Of course that’s only true if IE users upgrade. Several million already have, but the real upgrade process will begin when Microsoft pushes out automatic updates to move all IE 8 users to IE 9.

In a blog post attempting to explain why Firefox 4 trounced IE 9 in the number of initial downloads (the demand for Firefox 4 was roughly twice that of IE 9), Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Internet Explorer, writes, “Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June.” That, more than any other IE 9 date, is what web developers have been waiting for.

Keep in mind that IE 9 does nothing for the rather large contingent of Windows users still relying on Windows XP, but at least Vista and Windows 7 users will soon have a much improved web browser.

See Also:

• Internet Explorer 9 Arrives With More Speed, Better Web Standards Support
• Google Gives IE 9 the Gift of WebM
• IE9 Leads Pack in HTML5 Support? Not Exactly
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9′s HTML5/CSS 3 Support

Microsoft has announced a plug-in for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows Chrome on Windows to play H.264 web video through the HTML5 <video> tag. The new plug-in comes on the heels of Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome and focus on the company’s competing WebM video codec.

You can grab the new Chrome plugin from Microsoft. Microsoft previously released a similar H.264 plugin for Firefox, which also only supports WebM video.

The video move is the latest sign of a collision between the two tech giants, who now compete directly in search, courtesy of Microsoft’s Bing initiative and mobile, where Google’s Android is taking market share and the new Windows Phone 7 is struggling for a foothold. Google has also launched various cloud-based applications that take aim at Office. This week, the two threw punches over search, with Google claiming Microsoft copies its results, and Microsoft complaining the Google perpetrated a sting worthy of a spy novel.

Now the two are sparring over web video. Google has thrown its weight behind the WebM codec, which the company owns, while Microsoft supports H.264. However, Microsoft says that, provided Google makes some changes, it may be willing to support the WebM codec as well.

While HTML5′s video tag promises a native way to watch video in your browser, video codec support among browsers is divided. Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the WebM codec while Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE9 support H.264. As it stands there is no “it just works” solution, which means most websites still use Flash video players.

Microsoft’s H.264 plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome are part of the company’s attempt to be pragmatic — since Windows includes native support for H.264, users should be able to watch H.264 video even if the browser doesn’t support it. On the other side of the coin, Internet Explorer 9 will be able to play WebM video through a similar third-party plug-in.

However, while Microsoft isn’t including native support for WebM in the next version of IE, it doesn’t appear to totally rule out the idea. As part of the plugin announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, outlines some of Microsoft’s problems with the WebM codec. The main problem is that Microsoft is concerned about WebM’s potential patent risks.

Google insists that it owns all of the patents covering WebM and the VP8 video codec. But the company offers no indemnification for costs incurred should a patent lawsuit arise. That means that anyone distributing WebM/VP8 could be on the hook for any patent-related fees that might come up.

Some have dismissed Microsoft’s patent worries as an example of Microsoft spreading “fear, uncertainty and doubt” about WebM, but Microsoft does have history on its side in this case. As Hachamovitch points out, such patent lawsuits often don’t arise until a technology is in widespread use. So just because no one is suing over WebM now, doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Hachamovitch cites the JPEG photo compression format, pointing out that JPEG was around for ten years before the first patent lawsuits appeared. Eventually the patents in question were ruled invalid, but not before millions of dollars were spent defending and licensing JPEG.

Of course the same patent threats potentially hang over H.264, but the MPEG-LA consortium — the governing body that oversees the patents surrounding H.264 — provides a kind of legal buffer between H.264 licensees and any lawsuit.

Surprisingly, Hachamovitch says that, if Google is willing to indemnify WebM users against patent lawsuits, “Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8.” Of course that doesn’t mean other companies won’t, but it would be a huge step forward for WebM if Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon. Google did not respond to a request to comment in time for this story.

For now at least Microsoft has chosen a pragmatic approach — plugins. There will be a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer and H.264 plugins for Firefox and Chrome. In the end, Windows users will be able to watch just about any video on the web regardless of which browser they’re using. It might not be an ideal solution, but it is one that, from the user’s point of view, just works.

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264

Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft’s IE9 team deserves some major credit for finally building a browser with strong support for web standards. However, despite the impressive showing in the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) tests, it would be pure fiction to suggest that IE9 is that far ahead of its competitors when it comes to supporting HTML5, CSS 3 and other components of the new web.

The reason IE9 tops the W3C’s list is that the test looks at only a fraction of the HTML5 spec. In other words, the test is very limited. Even better, it’s limited to things IE9 is good at.

The W3C test looks at seven elements of HTML5: attributes, audio, video, Canvas, getElementsByClassName, foreigncontent, and XHTML5. While the audio, video and Canvas tags are perhaps the most widely used components in HTML5, that list is a long way from covering the entire HTML5 specification.

Run IE9 against other aspects of HTML5 and the browser would be decidedly behind its competitors. IE9 lacks support for Web Workers, drag-and-drop features, SVG animations and the File API, all of which are vital components for building useful web applications, and all of which enjoy considerable support in other browsers.

IE 9 has some support for CSS 3, but it lags behind other browsers, and it can’t handle much of SVG 1.1. From a web developer’s viewpoint, that means IE9 will load your Canvas tags, but if you’re using transforms or other animations based on CSS 3 tools, IE 9 users won’t see what you can show to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari users.

As an aside, running IE9 through the decidedly less formal (but still informative) HTML5Test site, the browser doesn’t perform as well as the competition. It scores 90 out of 300 points. Google Chrome scores 231 points and Safari 5 scores 208 points. Firefox 4 Beta 8 slots in at 217 points. The HTML5Test site ranks browsers based not only on W3C-approved components of HTML5, but also some experimental stuff, and some components that aren’t in the spec at all but are widely considered important tools for building more powerful HTML5 web applications, like Geolocation.

Perhaps what’s most curious about the areas IE9 does look good — the HTML5 Canvas, audio and video tags — is that they’re are all areas where Microsoft has previously touted its Silverlight platform as the ideal solution. With IE9, Microsoft is clearly backing away — at least for now — from its proprietary platform and moving toward the open web for these applications.

Internet Explorer 9 may not be perfect when it comes to HTML5 — no browser is — but at least it’s making huge strides over its predecessors. Perhaps the development would be more encouraging if its predecessors weren’t so firmly entrenched in the dark ages of the early web.

The latest version of Microsoft’s browser is expected to arrive in its final form some time during 2011. It is currently in beta release, and if you’re running Windows 7 or Vista, you can download it now.

This post was updated to reflect Firefox 4 beta 8′s score at HTML5Test instead of beta 7 [thanks, David].

See Also:

• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern
• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

That sounds like good news, right? After all, IE8 has its moments, but it isn’t exactly a cutting-edge browser. Certainly, any improvement would seem welcome.

Yet, judging by the reaction from the web-development community on Microsoft’s IEBlog, you’d think Microsoft just announced the release of a major virus.

To understand why web developers — and even ordinary users — aren’t particularly thrilled with this early preview of IE9, we need to start by taking a look at IE8′s shortcomings:

• Speed — This is all that matters for the average user, and all of IE8′s competitors are faster, something even Microsoft doesn’t deny.
• Emerging standards — Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have all begun implementing support for HTML5 and CSS 3, while IE8 has not. As more and more web apps take advantage of HTML5 tools, IE is in danger of becoming a second-class citizen on the web.
• Web apps — In addition to lagging in overall page-rendering speed, IE8 is well behind the competition when it comes to JavaScript performance. Though Microsoft has been quick to challenge the relevance of JavaScript benchmarks, regular users of Gmail, Facebook and other JavaScript-heavy web apps do not.

Now let’s take a look at what improvements Microsoft is planning to make in IE9.

Speed

The first item of business on the IEBlog post is IE9′s speed improvements. There are two basic elements, page-rendering times (including JavaScript improvements) and a proposed hardware-acceleration layer that hands off complex rendering tasks to the graphics card.

After a rather lengthy treatise on why JavaScript benchmarks aren’t really an accurate measure of page-load speed, Microsoft goes on to tout IE9′s improved JavaScript performance. Microsoft offers a graph of IE9 running the SunSpider JavaScript test, a common way of measuring JavaScript performance.

The results are split over two graphs, one with IE8 versus the browsers its competitors are currently shipping, and the other charting IE9 against other experimental builds.

However, what’s really interesting is combining the two graphs. Doing so shows IE9′s JavaScript speed is roughly on par with Firefox 3.5, but still much slower than Safari 4 and Chrome 3.

Microsoft’s chart showing JavaScript rendering speeds in various browsers. Shorter bars are better.

Why advertise the fact the latest and greatest builds of Internet Explorer still can’t beat the actual shipping versions of the competition? Frankly, we’re not sure. But we assume Microsoft plans to continue improving IE9 before it finally ships. Unfortunately for IE9, we assume Mozilla, Apple and Google plan to do the same with their experimental builds.

And that cuts to heart of why developers and anyone with an interest in the using the web of the future today has long since lost faith in Internet Explorer: The competition continues to deliver improvements at a pace that far outstrips Internet Explorer.

Standards and HTML5

While speed is probably the most obvious and important feature of a web browser, the faster development time of IE’s competitors also means they are able to add new, experimental features long before IE.

That’s why Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome already have support for large portions of HTML5 and CSS 3, while IE 8 has next to none.

IE8 saw Microsoft catching up and finally getting the basics of HTML 4.x and CSS 2.1 right (we’ll overlook IE8′s lack of support for CSS pseudo element syntax), but unfortunately for IE8, the web is already moving on to HTML5 and CSS 3.

The good news is that IE9 will finally support most of CSS 3. There’s a screenshot on the IEBlog that appears to show IE9 rendering 41 out of 43 selectors in the CSS 3 selector test.

That’s great news for web developers, because it means less work building standards-based websites — provided IE9 delivers on this front.

However, when it comes to HTML5 support, IE9 appears decidedly less progressive. Microsoft appears to be sticking to its rather hard line on HTML5 — it’s not an official recommendation, so we’re not going to build support for it until it is.

While Microsoft is technically right about HTML5 (it is expected to become a recommendation in about a year), the truth is the web moves at the speed of the people actually building and using it, not the speed of recommendations from the W3C. At this rate, the lack of HTML5 support is looking more and more like Internet Explorer’s death knell.

The IEBlog does mention the HTML5 storage API, which was included in IE8, but ignores other elements already enjoying support in IE’s competition. For example, there’s no mention of HTML5′s audio, video or canvas tags, nor is there any discussion of the Geolocation API, Web Workers or SVG tools.

The thing to remember is that HTML5 support isn’t just a question of making web developers happy. If Microsoft wants IE to continue to be relevant to the future of the web, it’s going to have to step up its HTML5 support. The lack of support for the emerging standard gives Google a great way to attack IE — simply build sites that don’t work in IE and offer a link to download Chrome Frame.

That’s exactly what happens if you try logging into Google Wave with IE8. Clearly, Google and others are planning to use HTML5 with or without IE at the party. The short story, from what Microsoft has revealed thus far, is that IE9′s standards support will be catching up to where Firefox, Safari and Opera were two or three years ago.

Other Features

The IEBlog also touts the fact that IE9 will use Windows’ DirectX APIs to move graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. That means that IE 9 should be faster at rendering pages, particularly on PCs that have more-powerful graphics cards.

Of course, once again, the competition is already moving in the same direction. In most cases, the other browsers are using WebGL, which handles not just 2-D rendering, but also 3-D as well.

The IEBlog also touts IE9′s improved text-handling with sub-pixel positioning and much better anti-aliasing. Again, nice to see IE9 catching up with the competition.

Conclusion

Microsoft needs to hit a home run with IE9, or the IE franchise is going to go the way of Geocities. Unfortunately, based on what Microsoft has shown so far, IE9 looks to be a base hit at best. Certainly IE 9 will be good news on several fronts, notably the speed improvements and the increased CSS 3 support. But once again IE is catching up, not leading the way as it once did.

The typical rebuttal to IE’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t matter — IE still maintains a dominant market share, and will continue to do so, because it ships alongside Windows on new computers. It’s true that IE controls a majority share of the web. Microsoft got that majority because it bested the competition. Keep in mind that IE’s majority share used to be much, much larger, and it continues to slip with every passing month.

While we’re sure there are plenty of people who would love to dance on IE’s grave, the truth is that competition is a good thing. We want to see Microsoft make a better browser. Sadly, thus far, IE9 doesn’t look very competitive.

See Also:

• A Brave New Web Will Be Here Soon, But Browsers Must Improve
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5