Showing posts with label microsoft internet explorer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microsoft internet explorer. Show all posts
09:12
IE9, standards, and why Acid3 isn't the priority
Redmond is targeting real-world applications based on real-world data. For example, every single JavaScript and DOM API used by the top 7,000 websites was recorded. IE9 will deliver support for every API used by those sites.
That obviously gives rise to a chicken-and-egg situation—what about the APIs that developers can't currently use because of a lack of widespread support, but would like to? Beyond the top 7,000 data, Microsoft has a number of HTML5 usage scenarios that it's targeting. The company has not said much on what those scenarios are, but given the demonstrations of HTML5 video and SVG animation, it seems that these are clearly viewed as core technology for a future HTML5-powered Web.
This dedication to HTML5 does not, however, mean that Microsoft is going to devote considerable effort to, for example, the SunSpider benchmarks or the Acid3 test. As the browser develops, the scores in those tests will likely improve (it currently gets 55/100, a marked improvement on IE8's 20/100), but they're not the number one priority. Acid3 is a scattergun test. It's not systematic—you can implement a high proportion of a particular specification and not pass the test, or a much lower proportion but still pass—and though many of the features it tests are useful, that's probably not the case for everything, and it's certainly not testing the one hundred most useful HTML5 features or anything like that.
More fundamentally, there are different degrees of "supporting a standard." Some demonstrations of the highly desirable and widely demanded CSS round borders helped explain this. The IE9 Platform Preview and WebKit both purport to support CSS3's rounded borders, and the Gecko engine (in Firefox) has an extension to provide rounded borders (the extension is nonstandard, but implemented in such a way as to not interfere with standard features). Rounded borders are something that developers are particularly keen on, since without CSS support, they have to be approximated with images, which is much less flexible (you can't easily change the colour or thickness of a border if it's done with images, for example). So in terms of desirability, they rank pretty high.
Unfortunately, they don't look consistent. At all:
This is probably what the designer wanted...
... and this probably isn't.
These are two browsers that both support a feature. But they look completely different. This has two interpretations: either one or both of the browsers is wrong, or the specification is lousy (such that both browsers are doing what the specification says, even though it's surely not what any developer would want). In general, this kind of discrepancy isn't something that a test like Acid3 will reveal. It needs systematic, thorough suites of tests that verify each individual part of the specification, and ensure that the different parts of the specifications work together.
In developing these tests, sometimes errors in the specification will be revealed. But it's also likely that errors in implementations will be revealed, even implementations that are widely perceived to "support" feature X or Y. Acid3 can't show just how much of the HTML5 standards a browser supports. It can't even tell you very much about which parts of the standards aren't supported. To do these things requires much more thorough testing.
It's for this reason that Microsoft is continuing the work it did for Internet Explorer 8. With IE8, Microsoft developed, and delivered to W3C, a huge library of CSS 2.1 tests. Systematic testing was the only way to ensure that the browser truly lived up to the demands of the specifications. So for IE9, the company is developing a new raft of tests, the first batch of which have already been submitted to W3C. Microsoft doesn't want IE9 to have the same kind of test results as other browsers presently do; a feature isn't done until all the tests pass.
A case could be made that these other browsers are perceived as more compliant than they really are; while there are certain browsers that excel in certain areas (Opera's SVG support has long been extensive), other browsers also have considerable gaps. Sure, not as big as the gaps that IE8 presently has, but substantial nonetheless. All vendors clearly have plenty of work to do before the "same markup" goal really becomes reality.
Scoring well on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark is similarly not an explicit target for IE9. SunSpider is useful, and tests JavaScript performance in many ways, but just as real web pages aren't written like the Acid3 test, real web applications aren't written like SunSpider. Real applications do things like optimize their design so that the basic page loads quickly, and then complex activities happen asynchronously in the background. SunSpider doesn't really test this style of development, and yet this is how real applications actually work.
This doesn't make SunSpider bad, but it explains why it's not a priority. It would be a mistake to optimize specifically for SunSpider, as SunSpider is not representative of real-world usage. Developers should optimize for reality, not for specific microbenchmarks.
Microsoft wants its HTML5 support to be stable and robust. This means that Internet Explorer 9 is unlikely to support every single part of the various specifications that make up HTML5; some parts are presently too much of a moving target to be viable. Other parts may be stable, but not relevant to the scenarios that the company is using to guide its development effort. But what the company will deliver will be thorough in a way that isn't necessarily the case with other browsers. Clearly the company has an up-hill struggle if its browser is to be perceived as highly conformant with Web standards. But it's certainly heading in the right direction.
07:06
Microsoft Previews Internet Explorer 9
Microsoft’s new browser, which won’t be available for at least a year, will support HTML5, a new web protocol which makes it possible to play videos and other embedded content on web pages without the need for a specialist plug-in, such as Adobe Flash. It will also offer enhanced support for CSS3 and an improved JavaScript Engine.
Although the browser is in such an early stage of development that it cannot even be called a “beta version”, it is possible to download the platform preview to see demonstrations of the new features.
“The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases,” said Dean Hachamovich, the browser team’s general manager, in a statement issued today before he took the stage at MIX10, Microsoft’s web developer conference, to publicly launch IE9.
Hachamovich promised that Microsoft would update the IE9 preview about every eight weeks, putting the first such update in mid-May with another to follow in mid-July. He did not, however, disclose a release schedule for the successor to 2009’s IE8, the browser bundled with Windows 7.
“While it loads and renders web pages using the Internet Explorer 9 platform, it is not designed to be a complete web browser,” Microsoft said in a fact sheet that accompanied the preview’s announcement. “This build is simply a first look at the work Microsoft has done so far and is ready to share with its developer community.”
Missing from the browser are critical user navigation tools such as the address bar, as well as security features like the SmartScreen anti-malware filter and IE8’s private browsing mechanism.
To give website designers, application developers, and others who want to track the new browser’s progress a chance to try IE9, Microsoft has created what it called a “Test Drive” site that showcases the features and enhancements included in the preview.
The Platform Preview will run only in Windows 7, Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server R2. The latter two operating systems require the Platform Update that Microsoft shipped last October. That update was notable for adding other Windows 7 features, such as that operating system’s ribbon-style interface, to Vista last year.
However, the preview will not run on Windows XP, the operating system that accounts for more than 71% of all Microsoft-made operating systems in use worldwide.
Analysts believe Internet Explorer 9 could help Microsoft to arrest the slide in its browser share, which has seen nearest rival, Mozilla’s Firefox, slowly increasing its footprint in the browser market at the expense of Microsoft.
“Microsoft wants to be more than a follower or just on features parity,” said Sheri McLeish, an analyst at Forrester. “And they’ve created a whole new team for Internet Explorer. Microsoft is clearly taking the browser seriously again.”
Unlike full-fledged editions of IE, the IE9 Platform Preview does not replace existing versions of IE, such as IE7 on Vista or IE8 on Windows 7, but runs alongside them on the same PC.
The preview is a 31MB download, and can be retrieved from the Test Drive site that Microsoft has set up. [IE Test Drive via Telegraph (UK) and TechRadar]