Windows 8. Photo: Microsoft

Microsoft has finally released an update for the Flash Player plugin that ships with Internet Explorer 10, patching vulnerabilities that Adobe has long since addressed for anyone using the standalone version of Flash.

Internet Explorer 10 bundles the Flash plugin directly into the browser, which means Adobe’s auto-update tools don’t work, nor can users manually download and install Flash updates. Any security patches and updates for Flash in IE 10 must come from Microsoft, through Windows Update.

However, Microsoft has, thus far, been quite a bit behind Adobe in updating Flash. The update now available for Flash in IE 10 addresses the problems, but comes a month after the vulnerabilities were made public. A Microsoft spokesperson previously told Webmonkey that the timing of Flash updates in IE 10 will be worked out before Windows 8 actually ships later this year.

This round of Microsoft security updates also brings a new version of IE 9, which patches a number of security holes, including a zero-day exploit which allows a malicious website to install the “Poison Ivy” malware, a backdoor trojan that can take over your PC and steal your data.

The Poison Ivy vulnerability was serious enough that Microsoft broke its traditional monthly security update cycle to release an emergency fix for IE earlier this month. If you happened to have missed the out-of-cycle update, be sure you apply this latest round of fixes in Windows Update.

It’s also worth noting that the Poison Ivy malware exploit works on IE 6, 7 and 8 as well as 9. If you’re on Windows XP, or are just stuck using an older version of IE, patches are also available. You can find the full details and a list of all affected platforms in Microsoft’s Security Bulletin.

If you’ve already upgraded to the Internet Explorer 10 preview you don’t need to worry about the Poison Ivy exploit since it doesn’t work in IE 10.

HTML5test.com scores for IE9 and Firefox

Mozilla then turned around and released an infographic that shows IE9 lagging well behind Firefox across the board — whether its HTML5 support, speed or CSS 3.

So who’s right? Well, both of them. IE9 is a huge leap forward for Microsoft. IE9 handles HTML5 and CSS 3 far better than its predecessors. As we said in our review of the release candidate IE9 is great news for web developers because it means the end of IE hacks and workarounds.

That said, IE9 offers nowhere near the level of HTML5 support found its competitors.

But what about Microsoft’s much-touted HTML5 compliance chart? Well, the tests used for that chart are the tests Microsoft developed for IE9 and submitted to the W3C. It should be no surprise that IE9 scores well in the tests it created, after all, those are the tests it was developed against.

IE9 does well on its own HTML5 tests

For something a bit less biased, grab a copy of the IE9 release candidate and point it any of the popular HTML5 test suites on the web — caniuse.com and HTML5tests.com are two good examples. Run IE9 RC1 and Firefox 4 through those tests and you’ll find that Firefox handy beats IE9 (as do Chrome, Opera and Safari). In fact, Firefox 3.5, which is over two years old, also handily beats IE9.

So how can Microsoft claim that IE9 is a “modern” browser with amazing HTML5 support? Well, Microsoft’s argument is that HTML5test and its ilk look for features that haven’t necessarily been finalized by the W3C. Microsoft’s rebuttal to Mozilla’s criticisms is that users don’t want experimental features, they want a fast browser that can handle HTML5 video, audio and canvas.

Microsoft’s Tim Sneath, director of Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism, says that “modern browsers implement features when they are ready, providing predictable patterns that developers can rely on rather than suddenly breaking or removing specifications.”

The problem with that claim is that, as we’ve often pointed out, the web doesn’t move at the speed of standards, it moves at the speed of innovative web browsers and developers. Sometimes there are hiccups along the way, but in taking the conservative track, IE9 is in danger of falling behind the web before it even makes it onto the web.

Internet Explorer’s market share has been in steady decline for several years now. IE has dropped from 68.5 percent world market share in July 2008 to 46 percent today (according to StatCounter).

Faced with dwindling market share and IE bashing in the web development community, many developers were hoping Microsoft would innovate, would build something amazingly far ahead of the competition. But that’s not the approach Microsoft has decided to pursue.

So while IE9 does an admirable job of catching up on web standards, it’s far from a leader when it comes to HTML5 and CSS 3 support. If you want a browser that works on today’s web, IE9 will make a fine choice. If you want a browser that’s already moving toward the web of the future then you might want to look elsewhere.

See Also:

• New IE9 Offers Geolocation, Privacy Controls and More Speed
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9′s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
• Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

If you’d like to know exactly where Internet Explorer 9 stands on support for emerging web standards in its current beta release form, Microsoft has put together a comprehensive list of all the supported HTML5 and CSS 3 features in IE9. The document notes that IE 9 is still a beta release, and the list is subject to change, but it makes a good list to help you get up to speed on IE 9′s new capabilities.

Internet Explorer 9 is a major leap forward for Microsoft in its promise to deliver solid web standards support. Although IE 9 still lags behind its competitors when it comes to supporting the latest HTML5 and CSS 3 code, it’s leaps and bounds beyond where IE 8 left off.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the list is that Microsoft has opted to skip the vender prefix in most of its CSS 3 support and simply use, for example, the border-radius rule. That means if you’ve been adding the straight CSS 3 rules in additions to the -webkit, -moz and -o prefixes, your fancy style sheets should already work in IE 9.

Among the good news for web developers in IE 9 is support for CSS 3′s border-radius property, opacity in images, CSS media queries and the new web fonts format, WOFF.

IE9′s WOFF support even has a nice showcase: a series of CSS font experiments dubbed Lost World’s Fairs. Using WOFF and Typekit, web designers Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero and Naz Hamid have put together some very impressive font demos to advertise World’s Fairs that never happened (we’re partial to the Atlantis World’s Fair).

The demos will work in any modern browser, including the new IE 9 beta.

While IE 9 isn’t a final release yet, things are definitely look up for web developers. Yes, we’ll still be supporting IE 7 and IE 8 for some time, and yes, IE9 still lacks a few things, like support for CSS 3 text-shadows or HTML5′s form elements, but it’s a step in the right direction.

See Also:

• Web Heavies Send a Love Letter to Open Web Fonts
• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern
• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

As part of the launch event to show off the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Microsoft also demoed a new version of its Bing search engine that uses HTML5 and CSS 3 to spice up Bing’s homepage and search results.

During the demo, Bing developers showed off a version of the search engine that uses the HTML5′s video tag to take Bing’s well-known background images a step further, replacing the static image with a video of waves crashing on the beach. Another new feature, using the Canvas element, will allow you to zoom around a very large image.

The revamped version of Bing will launch in October. Microsoft is still tweaking some of the code, but its demo at the launch event was already complete enough to impress.

Other tricks up Bing’s sleeve include some fancy transitions between search types — nice sliding and fading transitions between tabs (presumably done using CSS 3 transitions) — and other visual touches, like animated backgrounds for weather forecasts and auto-expanding search results.

Some of Bing’s coming enhancements have been in the works for quite a while. Microsoft previously demoed some of the background effects and other visual touches at Apple’s WWDC in June 2010.

Beyond the eye candy, Bing also has one pretty cool new feature — the ability to see slideshows from image search results. And here’s the best part of the new slideshow: it replaces Bing’s current Silverlight-based slideshow with an HTML5/CSS3-based version. Yes, Microsoft has ditched its own proprietary technology for something using open, standards-based technology.

Some of what’s in the video can be a little confusing. For example, why Microsoft thinks it needs “HTML5″ to keep Bing’s tabs at the top of the screen when in fact the CSS rule position:fixed has been widely supported for nearly ten years now is unclear.

But despite the marketing-speak tendency to refer to everything in the new Bing as HTML5 — which Apple and Google are also both occasionally guilty of — both the Bing and IE9 teams seem genuinely enthused about the possibilities of HTML5.

In theory, all of Bing’s new features should work in any modern web browser, not just the coming Internet Explorer 9. However, given the continual references to “leveraging the power of IE 9′s hardware acceleration,” it’s highly possible the new Bing may be a bit slower in Safari and Chrome, which, thus far, lack the depth of hardware acceleration found in the Firefox 4 and IE9 beta releases.

Microsoft says to expect the Bing changes “in about a month.”

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps
• Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern

Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft will release the first beta version of its new Internet Explorer web browser Wednesday morning.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta will be made available for download shortly after it is announced at a launch event in San Francisco, around 10:00am Pacific time. We’ll post a download link for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users as soon as we have one.

The final version of IE9 is still some months off — Microsoft wouldn’t commit to a definite time frame for the browser’s release when we asked. But we’ve spent a few days in IE9 Beta’s company, and so far, it has proven to be a thoroughly modern machine. The world’s most-sed browser is getting a new look, much expanded support for HTML5 and other 21st century web technologies, and a big speed boost.

Quite a change. Microsoft has a reputation for being an also-ran when it comes to browser innovation. When IE8 arrived in March 2009, we found it rich in features, but lacking in support for the emerging standards powering the shiny apps that make the web exciting. IE8 was faster and more secure than its predecessor, but when it came to speed and productivity, it wasn’t up to snuff with its peers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. In fact, it was a bit of a snooze.

A year and a half on, Microsoft has smelled the coffee and is wide awake at the wheel. IE is fit to play in the same league as the other browsers.

Keep in mind, IE9 Beta is still pre-release code, so it may not run perfectly. But there’s enough new going on here — especially that speed boost — to make the download a must for the curious who want a taste of IE’s future.

A new look

The most striking difference between this browser release and the IEs of old is the new user interface. It’s sleek and minimal, and — what are those? — it now has the inverted top-tabs, which are quickly becoming common.

We first caught wind of this design change when a screenshot of the new IE9 leaked onto the web. It decreases the amount of real estate the browser consumes on screen and makes way for more content.

Another shot of IE9 Beta. Click for larger.

Freeing up those extra pixels with a minimal top bar is a path others in the industry are taking. Chrome shipped with the tabs-on-top look two years ago, Mozilla has adopted it for Firefox 4, and Safari has flirted with in the past. Opera offers a few different choices for where to put your tabs.

Other notable details: a unified search and URL bar (a la Google Chrome) where you can get search suggestions as you type. Bing is the default, but you can add Google, Wikipedia or a host of other engines. There’s also an enlarged back button, (a la Firefox) and a noticeable lack of menu items in the main bar. Something else new in IE9 is the New Tab window with thumbnails of your most commonly-visited sites, which looks much like what you’ll find in Safari, Chrome and Opera. A nice addition here is a little bar in each thumbnail that shows how much time you’ve spent on each site.

The reason these same design themes (top-tabs, unified URL bar) keep showing up in all the browsers is that they just make sense from a usability standpoint. Designers use a constantly evolving visual language to suggest interactions. It’s no different than the way advertisers, filmmakers and visual artists borrow ideas from each other to trigger certain emotions and reactions in an audience.

So we can’t cry “copycat.” Plus, IE9 does offer some unique UI enhancements you won’t find elsewhere.

One is the new notification system — instead of a pop-up in the middle of the screen or at the top (“You need to install Flash!”), you see only a slim notification about as tall as your index finger slide up from the bottom of the screen.

But the coolest new innovation is the ability to “pin” a web page to your Windows taskbar.

Pinned sites

Instead of bookmarking a site, clicking the “favorite” star or dragging a favicon to the bookmarks bar — all of which you can still do, of course — you can drag the favicon to the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Once it’s there, the browser’s buttons will change color to match the color of the favicon, making the browser feel more like a site-specific tool than just an all-purpose piece of software.

“We’re saying ‘Look at the site!’ instead of ‘Look at the app,’” Hachamovitch says.

Something else happens in the taskbar that enhances this effect.

It works sort of like a Fluid app or a Prism app. Click on the favicon in the taskbar and the site launches in a new, single-tabbed window. Right-click on it and you get a jump list — a list of actions specific to that website like “Top Stories” or “Latest Photos”.

Hachamovitch says Microsoft is responding to users’ desire to go directly to a website from the desktop. He cites internal Microsoft data that shows only about ten percent of IE users actually launch sites from the bookmark bar. The rest type URLs or click a link somewhere on the deskop.

“We’ve spent fifteen years developing a browser UI, and nobody’s using it,” he says. “What actually gets used is the landscape around the browser.”

These action inside the jump lists can be defined by site developers, who can add whatever they want by adding some markup to their pages (We weren’t supplied with examples of this markup in time for Wednesday’s launch, but we’ll provide details as soon as we can). There are also default actions to close the window and to start an In-Private browsing session, so if there’s no special markup added to the page, at least those will appear.

Performance

As we noted in the most recent preview releases, IE9 earns big points for performance improvements. It’s the same story with Wednesday’s beta.

IE9 Beta owes much of its speed boost to the new hardware acceleration features inside the browser. It passes off the most complex rendering tasks — animations, video, and heavily-styled text — to the graphics processor, and its new JavaScript engine (which Microsoft calls “Chakra”) is capable of using your PC’s extra processing cores to execute scripts on pages.

We first saw these hardware acceleration enhancements in the third preview release of IE9, and we’ve seen other browsers incorporating similar features recently, as well. Firefox 4, now in the beta stage but due in a month or two, has similar hardware acceleration features that tap into the same Windows 7 APIs that IE uses (Firefox’s extra hardware sauce is only available on Windows builds for now). Also, Google Chrome has begun including hardware acceleration for compositing in both Chrome 6 and Chrome 7 builds for Windows.

Since this is still a beta, we’re likely to see very close to the same level of performance when the browser ships. Between now and then, you may encounter some quirks and bugs.

The enhancements to the JavaScript engine were evident when I ran some of Microsoft’s official demos on its test drive site, as well as in the SunSpider benchmark suite. In real-world applications, like Gmail and Facebook, the browser’s speed and behavior was very close to what I normally see in Chrome and Firefox. There were a few things that didn’t work as advertised, like the chat windows in Gmail. They failed to minimize properly, preferring to dumbly blink when I clicked on them.

Developer’s tools are built in (just hit F12) if you want to dig into the DOM or measure performance.

Web standards

Internet Explorer 9′s support for both established and emerging web standards is sure to be sharply scrutinized. It’s an area where previous versions of IE have lagged considerably. For years, Microsoft was loathe to adopt support for unratified standards, considering them a moving target and thus a waste of time. As such, IE8 contained only partial support for HTML5 and newer CSS 3 components.

With IE9 Beta, we see a reversal of that stance. IE9 supports much of HTML5, and there’s a new parser to handle the new markup language. There’s support for native playback of audio and video files, and the Canvas element, with support for animated 2D polygons and text. HTML5 selection is supported, but not drag-and-drop or Microdata.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard is supported, and like other animation and media features in the browser, it can take advantage of hardware acceleration.

There’s finally real support for CSS 3 in this release — media queries, borders and backgrounds, selectors, the fonts module and the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) rich type standard, among other things.

Web standards support in IE9 isn’t perfect (who can claim that?), but it’s certainly admirable. Most importantly, IE9 is likely to be a boon for the web when the final version ships sometime in the coming months.

Once all the Windows 7 and Vista users out there update to the final version of IE9 — either manually or automatically — the web will begin its shift to a new era where the large majority of browsers can handle more complex graphics, behaviors and markup. Which is not to say the web won’t still be fractured and forked in various ways (vendor-specific capabilities will probably always be around), but the browser’s arrival will signal a much-needed step forward.

What’s next?

Internet Explorer 9 will arrive either later this year or early 2011 — Microsoft isn’t saying. And that brings up a danger point.

The number two and three browser vendors have all sped up their development cycles. Chrome is releasing new code every six to eight weeks, and Mozilla is committed to pushing out new Firefox releases every six months. Microsoft has made no mention of its intent to speed up its own browser release schedule, so it’s likely Internet Explorer 10 is a year or two off. Meanwhile, the competition will continue to deliver improvements at a pace that far outstrips Microsoft.

See Also:

• Leaked Screenshot Shows a Cleaner, Simpler IE9
• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives
• A Guide to Hardware Acceleration in Modern Browsers
• New IE9 Preview Features More Speed, Standards Support

Is your browser faster than the Shinkansen?

Microsoft created some controversy on its IEBlog this past weekend with a post claiming that the IE9 beta release was “the first and only browser to deliver full hardware acceleration of all HTML5 content.”

However, despite Microsoft’s claims, Firefox 4 also takes advantage of the same Windows 7 APIs that Microsoft uses to accelerate both the compositing and the rendering of webpages, and it has done so for some time. Yes, Mozilla’s hardware acceleration support is still very much limited to beta releases and nightly builds, but so are IE9′s hardware acceleration features.

Mozilla was understandably a bit angry about Microsoft’s misleading claims. But, to be fair, the IEBlog doesn’t actually call out Firefox by name, so it’s possible Microsoft sees Google Chrome as its real competitor. Chrome’s hardware acceleration lags behind Mozilla and Microsoft’s efforts, but even Chrome has included hardware acceleration for compositing in both Chrome 6 and Chrome 7 builds.

Confused yet? To help you keep things straight, here’s a handy chart showing all three layers of hardware acceleration and which browsers support each:

Another strange claim in the post on the IEBlog is that IE9′s hardware acceleration is somehow faster because it doesn’t support other platforms — not even Windows XP. The reasoning is that by targeting on one platform, Microsoft can focus its efforts more clearly, and build tight support for behaviors specific to Windows 7.

In Firefox 4′s case, the hardware acceleration is somewhat abstracted, so it can eventually support Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows. Even now, Firefox supports partial Windows XP hardware acceleration.

Despite Microsoft’s claim, in our tests (and most others publicly available) IE9 and Firefox are neck and neck. And, as Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan points out, “an extra abstraction layer need not hurt performance — if you do it right.”

In the end, who came first and how it’s done behind the scenes will be a moot point. Users will win in the end — a few months from now, there will very likely be three hardware accelerated web browsers available for Windows, with more operating systems getting the capabilities through non-IE browsers.

Shinkansen photo by 663highland/Wikimedia Commons/CC

See Also:

• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives
• Firefox 4 Beta 5 Adds Audio Tools, Hardware Acceleration
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration