All posts tagged ‘Microsoft’

File Under: HTML5, Multimedia, Web Standards
Dec
16
2010

Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox

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Thanks to licensing issues and exorbitant fees, Mozilla doesn’t support the H.264 video codec in Firefox, but Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) is aiming to change that.

Microsoft has created a Firefox plug-in that will tap into Windows 7′s native H.264 support, allowing Firefox 3.6 and the 4.0 betas to play H.264 encoded video.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can download a copy of the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in from Microsoft’s Interoperability Labs.

The HTML5 video tag promises to eliminate the need for third-party plugins like Flash or QuickTime. Sadly, it’s a long way from “promises” to “delivers.” While HTML5 offers a video tag for authors to easily add videos to their webpages, it’s up to the browser to actually play that video. And that’s where the problem arises — what video codec should the browser use?

Apple is standing firm behind the H.264 video codec. But H.264 has licensing requirements, fees and is not free in any sense of the word. Mozilla Firefox supports Ogg Theora and WebM, both of which are open and free. Google’s Chrome supports all three codecs. Opera supports Ogg Theora and WebM. Microsoft has decided to support H.264 and WebM in IE9.

In short, varying codec support across browsers has made native HTML5 video a mess.

Microsoft’s new add-on brings support for H.264 to Firefox whether Mozilla wants it or not. The add-on parses HTML5 pages and replaces video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in. Unfortunately it’s not perfect. To deal with the different codec support in each browser, many sites use JavaScript to determine the browser’s codec support before presenting a video. If that’s the case, the new add-on won’t work because the detection code won’t see the H.264 support (the H.264 support is an add-on, not a native part of Firefox).

Ironically, native web video isn’t supported at all in Microsoft’s own browsers, regardless of the codec used (IE9 will introduce support for HTML5 video when it is released next year). Third-party developers have already created an experimental IE add-on to help current versions of IE get in on the native web video fun.

Microsoft’s add-on is far from ideal, but if you’ve been frustrated by Firefox’s lack of H.264 support, it does offer a partial solution. Hopefully, in the long run, browsers will standardize around WebM, which seems to enjoy the most widespread support (Apple’s Safari is current only browser that hasn’t pledged WebM support), but if that doesn’t happen solutions like this one may become even more common.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
17
2010

New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft pushed out another preview release of Internet Explorer 9 Wednesday. This is not a new beta release — we’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — but we’re definitely approaching the finish line.

Wednesday’s release, dubbed Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 (whew) includes a big performance boost with a newly revamped JavaScript engine inside of it.

The last preview release of IE9, which only arrived a few weeks ago, saw increased support for web standards. But Microsoft made it clear to us during a phone briefing that Wednesday’s release is all about speed and performance.

To that point, PP7 contains an updated version of the Chakra JavaScript engine. This new engine for IE9 was first introduced at Microsoft’s PDC developer event in November 2009. During the last year, the company has been improving Chakra to the point where it’s now scoring over 300 percent higher on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark than it was at launch.

Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin from the IE team says the new release scores 234.6 ms on SunSpider’s JavaScript execution performance test. Read more about the testing stuff on the IE Blog.

While some browsers are certainly faster than others, the major browser vendors continue to tweak their internal workings and make small improvements to speed. JavaScript performance is particularly important, since modern web applications like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on scripted actions. A faster browser means a snappier web app. Just last week, Mozilla released a new beta of Firefox 4 that included revamped code for its JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey JavaScript engines.

You can download this early version of the next IE browser directly from Microsoft. It’s available for PCs running Windows 7 and Vista. Also, this platform preview can be installed alongside IE9 Beta or IE8 with no problems.

Once you grab it, head over to the company’s demo playground and put the new browser through the paces. Be sure to report your results in the comments.

Continue Reading “New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power” »

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Nov
2
2010

IE9 Leads Pack in HTML5 Support? Not Exactly

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

The standards body that oversees HTML5 has released the results of its first tests designed to measure the level of HTML5 support in web browsers. The results, surprisingly, put Internet Explorer 9 ahead of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

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].

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
28
2010

Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

We’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — it’s likely due some time during the first half of 2011 — but Microsoft continues to roll new features and additional web standards support into its next-gen browser.

The company put out a sixth pre-release “platform preview” of IE9 Thursday. It includes support for CSS3′s 2D transforms. There are also improvements to hardware acceleration, font rendering, and the browser’s JavaScript engine. You can read about these enhancements in depth on the official IE Blog.

Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September. But this new release is not a second beta, it’s the sixth platform preview. A bit confusing, sure. But beta releases are considered to be almost totally stable and are intended for a more general audience. Platform previews are on the bleeding edge, and may contain code that isn’t as thoroughly tested. So, this release is primarily aimed at developers.

IE9 Beta is doing spectacularly well, however — Microsoft says its beta release has been downloaded ten million times since its release six weeks ago. It has also been receiving kudos for its expanded support of web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF.

Here’s a video showing off the new stuff in IE9 platform preview 6:

If you watch the video and read the post on the IE Blog, you’ll notice a lot of emphasis on “full hardware acceleration” in IE9, and how other browsers like Chrome and Firefox can’t perform as well as IE9 because they only offer “partial” hardware acceleration. In fact, all browsers have access to the same Windows APIs that enable off-loading work to the PC’s graphics processor when needed to speed up 2D and 3D animation rendering. This has been an issue of some debate over the past two months, with Microsoft and Mozilla going toe-to-toe over the issue.

If you want to test the new IE9 platform preview 6, it’s available for Windows 7 and Vista only. Microsoft also released some new tests at the ietestdrive site — run all your browsers through them.

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File Under: HTML5, Software
Oct
13
2010

Export Adobe Illustrator Drawings and Animations to HTML5

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There’s a new conversion tool for fans of Adobe’s popular Illustrator desktop publishing app that lets developers export their vector drawings and animations as HTML5 code that runs natively in the latest web browsers.

The new tool is called Ai>Canvas, and it does exactly what the name implies. You can take any vector illustrations you’ve made in Adobe Illustrator and export them as 2D graphics that can be drawn on web pages using the HTML5 Canvas element. It can even animate your drawings.

The plug-in can handle gradients and transparencies, complex pattern fills, drop shadows, complex line styles and text, exporting everything as HTML5 Canvas code. In cases where your illustration contains something that can’t be done in Canvas (like an opacity mask) the plug-in rasterizes that bit and positions it properly.

The plug-in also supports commands for animation. You can add rotation, object scaling, fades, and movement along a path. All of your parameters are defined inside Illustrator, but when you export to HTML5, you can tweak the resulting web code to fine-tune the results. You can also add interactions, like sounds, or click events.

The plug-in works in Illustrator for Creative Suite versions 5, 4 and 3. There are versions for Windows and Mac OS X.

Oddly, it doesn’t come directly from Adobe. It’s a product of Microsoft’s Mix Labs, an initiative the company has set up to experiment with open web technologies. Microsoft has taken a larger interest in open web standards ever since work began on building in support for HTML5 and advanced web technologies into Internet Explorer. The next version, IE9, is already in beta, with the final version due some time next year.

The creator of the plug-in, Microsoft developer and platform evangelist Mike Swanson, is also the author of the XAML exporter for Illustrator. He got interested in HTML5 and Canvas after a passionate conversation about the technology with his co-worker, Thomas Lewis. You can read the whole story — and see some of his working examples and test files — on Swanson’s blog. Lewis has written his own post, as well.

Adobe Labs recently released an SVG pack for Illustrator which can export drawings as SVG that run in browsers that support the format. But this new Ai>Canvas exporter uses HTML5 Canvas, which is quickly becoming widely adopted by developers working on games and virtual worlds that run in the browser. Check out the Asteroids and Rumpetroll experiments for some cool Canvas work.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
15
2010

Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern

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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.

“The browser is the stage and the backdrop, but the website is the star of the show,” Microsoft general manager of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch tells Wired. “We think the browser should totally take a back seat to the sites.”

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.

Continue Reading “Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern” »

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Sep
9
2010

Microsoft’s Sticky Position: Silverlight or HTML5?

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Microsoft is deeply invested in two key technologies for building web apps: its Silverlight runtime, which requires a plug-in to work in web browsers, and HTML5, which has many of the same key capabilities, but is plug-in-free, is friendlier to mobile devices and will be heavily supported in the next version of Internet Explorer.

Tech blogger Tim Anderson has written a couple of posts Thursday speculating how Microsoft should “sell” the Sliverlight story to developers who are excited about HTML5 and the coming advancements in Internet Explorer 9.

The first post has some candid remarks from former Microsoft Silverlight product manager Scott Barnes, where he says, in some cryptic tweets, that there’s “a faction war” happening inside Microsoft over HTML5 and Silverlight.

According the Anderson, Microsoft is having an increasingly hard time positioning Silverlight as an attractive option for developers who see that HTML5 can do much of the same stuff. IE9 beta is due this month. It will offer hardware acceleration and direct access to the Windows 7 desktop, plus all of the other capabilities of a modern browser, like super-fast JavaScript performance. So, it’s not going to get any easier.

The Silverlight team has been on the defensive recently, with Microsoft’s head of developer platforms Brad Becker arguing last week that Silverlight does indeed have a place on the HTML5-powered web, where it’s used to power rich apps like games, teleconferencing apps, and DVR-like streaming apps. There is no doubt, though, that the web is catching up.

Continue Reading “Microsoft’s Sticky Position: Silverlight or HTML5?” »

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File Under: Location, Web Apps
Aug
3
2010

Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps

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You can now turn on a special layer in Bing Maps that displays maps from OpenStreetMap, Microsoft has announced.

OpenStreetMap is an open source mapping project that keeps an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits to the map — it’s been nicknamed the “Wikipedia of maps.” The open source model has proven especially effective in regions of the developing world where very little solid map data exists, and in areas where highly detailed, editable maps are critical for natural-disaster response efforts, like the recent Haiti earthquake.

Microsoft’s adoption of the open source mapping project follows a similar move by MapQuest, which began adding OSM layers last month.

To run layers in Bing Maps, you’ll need the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight and a supported browser. It doesn’t work properly in Google Chrome (at least on the Mac), but IE8, Firefox and Safari had no problems. If you’re using the Ajax controls to view Bing Maps (instead of Silverlight), then you won’t be able to see the OpenStreetMaps layer, but Microsoft says this is something that may make its way into the non-Silverlight version eventually.

Use the map view switcher at the bottom to change layers.

To add OpenStreetMaps to your Bing, go to the App Gallery. Look for the new OpenStreetMaps app in the gallery. Click on it, and your alternative OpenStreetMaps view should launch within Bing Maps.

You can switch back to any of the other standard views in Bing Maps by clicking on the layer control at the bottom of the map window. You’ll notice Bing Maps is using the Mapnik build of OpenStreetMaps for its map layer. You can switch back and forth between the OSM layer and any of the other standard Bing maps layers using the same control.

Microsoft has been quickly adding some innovative features to Bing, especially on its Maps website. In June, Bing Maps added the ability to browse parts of the world in 3-D, and in February it demonstrated indoor panorama views and location-specific videos that are accessible within Bing’s street-side imagery.

Microsoft also ran its King of Bing maps challenge for developers last month, asking them to create innovative apps for the mapping platform. For the contest, a developer named Ricky Brundritt built an app for Bing Maps that estimates your taxi fare within most major U.S. cities.

However, Bing’s reliance on Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight technology to power these innovations is seen by some as an alienating factor — and an unnecessary one at that, since other mapping platforms like Google Maps accomplish much of the same functionality using JavaScript and other web standards. This is especially important on mobile devices, where the most popular browsers don’t allow for plug-ins like SIlverlight.

Still, it’s heartening to see Bing adding to the momentum OpenStreetMaps is currently enjoying. Anyone can edit the OSM maps, and now that the project is getting some attention — thanks mostly to its efforts in Haiti — edits are coming in more quickly.

According to the latest stats, the project has over a quarter of a million participants and over 1.8 billion uploaded GPS points. Dedicated users are getting creative and finding ways to add even more detail to the existing maps by doing offbeat things like tagging wheelchair ramps, mailboxes and trees in their neighborhoods.

Taxi Fare Calculator link courtesy Mashable

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File Under: Software, Web Apps
Jul
7
2010

Meet WebMatrix, Microsoft’s New Suite For Painless Web Development

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Microsoft has unveiled a new all-in-one web development suite called WebMatrix.

It’s more than an IDE or a framework, it’s a whole suite — a web server, a SQL database, and a database-ready framework, all wrapped up into a single development environment that makes it easy to build, test and deploy some fairly complex web apps.

WebMatrix is free, and it’s available for Windows users as a beta download.

The new suite is especially geared towards developers building web apps that require local data storage. It’s pretty flexible, and you can also use it to build simple websites, then scale up to something mid-weight or incorporate a full-scale app that you could run a business on top of.

The WebMatrix suite is made up of three components: the lightweight Windows-based web server called IIS Express, SQL Server Compact Edition, a simple database server, and Razor, a new templating language based on ASP.NET. The beta version you can download today actually doesn’t have Razor, but it will be included in a future release “later this month,” according to Microsoft.

The three key technologies were previously announced by Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s VP of its Developer Division. Now, with the launch of WebMatrix, Guthrie has introduced a few new components.

Continue Reading “Meet WebMatrix, Microsoft’s New Suite For Painless Web Development” »

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Jun
9
2010

Google Updates Chrome Frame Add-On for Internet Explorer

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Google has released a significant update to its controversial Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer plug-in that replaces the default IE rendering engine with the engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome Frame essentially embeds Google’s browser inside any tab or window within Internet Explorer. It forces IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like embedded audio and video.

Previously only available as a “developer preview,” the new version of Chrome Frame has been updated to beta status. Chrome Frame’s underlying code has also been updated to match the Chrome 5 browser, which means Chrome Frame can now handle more HTML5 features like better audio and video playback, Canvas animations, geolocation, Web Workers, WebSocket connections and offline databases.

Chrome Frame now also integrates with IE more closely, meaning that the add-on now works with IE’s InPrivate browsing mode, and that clearing cookies and cache in IE will now also clear out the same elements in Chrome Frame.

If you’re stuck with IE 6 at work, but you want to see the latest and greatest the web has to offer, Chrome Frame makes for a decent solution. The only downside to Chrome Frame is that it will only be triggered on websites that have explicitly enabled it using a special meta tag. Of course, all of Google’s sites are on that short list, so you can at least experience some cool cutting-edge stuff like drag-and-drop in Gmail, geolocation in Google Maps, or real-time communication in Google Wave.

Despite the fact that Chrome Frame does not just take over IE, Google’s add-on is not without some degree of controversy. Back when Chrome Frame was first announced, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, warned against the idea, arguing that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit.

So far those fears haven’t come to pass, but now that Chrome Frame is a beta release, it may begin to see wider use.

Shaver’s main argument — that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy — is still undeniably the best solution. After all, if you’re savvy enough to know about and install Chrome Frame, you’re most likely savvy enough to just upgrade IE or switch to a better browser. But even the most recent version of Internet Explorer, version 8, doesn’t have the same level of capability as Chrome, and Chrome Frame gives IE users an opportunity to play around on the bleeding edge.

Also, there’s a subset of users who need IE 6 for legacy corporate intranets and applications, but also need to interact with today’s web. Given that several Google services — like Google Apps and Google Reader — no longer support IE 6, the day is fast approaching where Chrome Frame will be the only option for those still locked into IE 6 who want to use the newest web apps.

If you’re one of those people, head over to grab the latest version of Chrome Frame.

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