Joe Walker - ie tag

IE8 Review

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:53:58 GMT

I've been playing with IE8 beta 1, and I've got some thoughts ...

In terms of user visible HTML rendering features, I think IE 8 beta 1 is possibly the biggest release of IE in nearly 11 years since April 1997 when IE 4.0 alpha 1 was released. The history shows mostly bug fixes, and chrome changes since then. Maybe transparent PNG or Bidi text are bigger than Activities? It looks like that's going to be the feature that most people talk about, so I'm going to talk about some of the other stuff. There are 3 big things I'm interested in, and a few smaller features:

6 Connection Limit

I've been testing the new 6 connection limit. It works perfectly in my testing, Without any cookie or window.name hacks, DWR can do reverse ajax using comet to more than 2 browser windows:

DOM Storage

IE is way behind everyone else in implementing HTML5 features. So this is catching up to everyone else. It will be interesting to hear from the Dojo guys on this.

// sessionStorage also available
var store = window.globalStorage["http://www.example.com"];
store.setItem("key", "value");
var value = storage.getItem("key"); // == "value"
store.removeItem("key");

JavaScript Debugger

Firebug has been a stick that's been used to beat up IE for a while, and they've got an answer now. Unlike the other features, there isn't a screenshot in the release notes...

Firebug is still much better, in my opinion so far. But this is certainly a huge step forward compared to fighting with Script [Editor|Debugger] or Visual WebDev.

Acid 3

IE 8 does very badly on Acid 3 (17/100). However given that it's so new it's probably not fair to ding it too much. However it does need to improve big time:

WebKit Nightly: 87%
Opera 9.5b: 64%
Firefox 3.0b3: 61%
IE 8b1: 17%

For comparison, the released versions:

Firefox 2.0.0.12: 50%
Opera 9.26: 46%
Safari 3.0.4: 39%
IE 7: 11%

Given that they are innovating, I'm prepared to give them time to get the number up.

URL Bar Goodness

I didn't see this in the release notes anywhere. On Firefox I've got an add-on called LocationBar 2 that does some nice widgetry with the URL Bar:

Well it looks like IE8 has something similar built in too:

Cross-Domain XHR

The standards are still evolving on this one, but somewhat annoyingly IE8 seems to be going in a different direction from everyone else:

var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); 
xdr.open("POST", "http://www.example.com/xdr.txt");
xdr.send("Data for post body");

What is missing?

Lots. Still. No SVG/Canvas. No updates to the JScript implementation at a language level (it looks like there have been some performance increases though).

Let's not forget that Microsoft have more resources to get this right than almost anyone. If Opera can manage to create a first class browser, so should Microsoft.

And Finally ...

I loved the irony of the download recommendation. If you're downloading IE8, you might also like to download - IE6!:

Microsoft Anti-Trust Retrospective

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:39:23 GMT

It was about 5 years between Netscape 4 and Mozilla 1.0. In that time, they lost about 80% market share.

It was about 5 years between IE6 and IE7. In that time, they lost about 10% market share.

Just in case there was any doubt about the argument that Netscape killed themselves, clearly there were other forces at work. It wasn't just down to a much criticized rewrite decision. Perhaps a better remedy than trying to get Microsoft broken up, would have been to insist on the default installation of an alternate browser.

Reducing the Edit-Compile-Test Cycle

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:43:30 GMT

There's a fairly obvious link between developer productivity and the edit/compile/test cycle. One of the big things wrong with Enterprise Java is that you swap the edit/compile/test cycle for an edit/compile/deploy/test cycle and one of the things right about PHP is that edit/compile/test is just edit/test.

I've previously complained about IE7 and the fact that you couldn't install IE7 with other IEs and the old tricks were reported not to work. The issue is that a good chunk of IE is embedded in the OS so randomly replacing bits of the OS with older versions gets a bit hairy. However is it really too hard for them to test a few configurations of DLLs to get it to work? It's a shame that Firefox can host a foreign IE renderer, but IE can't.

On the other hand Microsoft wants to sell you VirtualPC.

So you install an extra 1Gb of RAM, ignore Microsoft's advice about buying VirtualPC and get VMWare for free instead and set about an edit/compile/switch to vmware/test cycle. You might need to buy a copy of MSDN too because I seem to remember that it is illegal to install the same copy of XP twice on the same machine, but I could be wrong there.

DWR has been using HostedQA recently. HostedQA for me is JUnit + Cruise Control + Selenium + an army of browsers. We've been testing DWR using HostedQA for a while now and it rocks. It's helped us find bugs, and the plan is to set it up so we can test with a whole bunch of browsers so I don't even have to mess about with Firefox profiles. To a certain extent it can make the edit/compile/test cycle an edit/check-in cycle.

Big IE change - ActiveX disabled by default

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 07:38:52 GMT

From the Microsoft security center:

So when we release the next cumulative IE security update, customers will only be able to interact with Microsoft ActiveX controls loaded in certain web pages after manually activating their user interfaces by clicking on it or using the TAB key and ENTER key.

I'm assuming that this applies to visible ActiveX controls only, and that scripted ones are still OK. IE is going to be in a very sorry state otherwise.

Since this is all about the Eolas case which was all about visual components I guess this is a safe assumption.

Also from the same announcement:

The good news here is that we are on a path to include the fix for the zero day vulnerability as part of the April IE cumulative security update and possibly sooner if our ongoing monitoring and analysis of attempts to exploit vulnerability shows customers are being impacted seriously.

I'm not sure that it's good news that we have to wait a few weeks for a fix to a fairly serious IE hole that is currently being exploited, but at least there is a fix on the way.

IE7 will make life hard for IE6 users

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:42:43 GMT

This sequence of events ends up with the release of IE7 being a bit of a train wreck for many users. I'm not totally sure about the logic behind this sequence of events. What do you think?

First the facts:

The renderers in IE5.5 and IE6 are broadly similar, some CSS bugs fixed, but nothing compared to the IE7 changes.
Very few people use IE5 any more.
Many web developers have got lazy and are in the habit of just testing with IE6 and ignoring IE5.5.
For the more conscientious, there is a trick to allow IE6 and IE5.5 to run on the same PC.
The .local trick doesn't appear to be working with IE7.
Web developers with bad habits from the IE6 world and those that don't have VMWare (less excuse now!), are likely just test with IE7 and ignore IE6.
IE7 breaks CSS hacks and makes big changes to the way the renderer works, so IE6 and IE7 have very different rendering engines.
New web pages that have only been tested in IE7 will probably look very bad in IE6, and there could well be a lot of them.
The uptake of IE7 will be fast for people with XP (Windows update) and slow for everyone else.

Net result: IE6 users get a web experience that gets worse over time. They blame IE and move to Firefox.

I think it would be wise for Microsoft to admit to the .local trick and make it work properly. We need a way to run multiple copies of IE without running multiple OSs.

I don't buy the "but IE is part of the OS" argument. Whatever the technicalities are - we need a way to run IE6 and IE7 side-by-side, and there are some pointers as to how to do it. Lets make it work properly.

Personally I think it's likely that IE7 will severely curtail the market-share haemorrhaging that IE is now suffering, and the browsers will sit about 85/15 or whatever for quite a while.

But anything above 10% is good enough for me. Double figures means that most websites won't be able to ignore Firefox and will be forced into the standards compliance route, and so long as we get that, the battle to force everyone down the proprietory route is for Microsoft.