Comic Update: That Is Fast
September 15, 2010Today’s comic features the woodland creatures side of CSSquirrel, with the Opera Moose, Naepalm (the animal version of Mindfly Studio’s very own Janae) and none other than IE9 himself.
I’m actually shocked by the IE9 beta that was released today. It’s got a slick, minimal interface that is such a radical departure from what I’m accustomed to from Internet Explorer that I’m left speechless. It’s also fast. Surprisingly so.
These two facts are just a small portion of what IE9 brings to the table. Improved CSS3 support. HTML5 elements are now supported, including beautiful elements like <video>, <audio> and and the sexy girl on the block: <canvas>.
I could wax eloquent, but I prefer to direct your attention to smarter people saying the same thing with better word choices, like Rey Bango. Go check his blog post on the topic right now.
One beef people are pulling out to disparage the new release with is IE9′s lack of support on XP. I get the gist of where they’re coming from: the less operating systems IE9 is supported on, the harder it’ll get to make hardliners upgrade off IE6 or 7. But the fact is, XP is old. Really old. You don’t see people complaining because Safari 5 isn’t supported on Mac OS X 10.4, do you? I’m sure the reason Apple didn’t do backwards support is the reason Microsoft did what they’re doing. Both are in the habit of selling OSes. And if you’re not calling Apple down for that behavior, it’s more than a little hypocritical to do the same to Microsoft.
(Frankly, If you’re using a beast of an old OS, I suggest you go to other vendors like Mozilla and Opera for your modern web experience. Or upgrade your OS. Which path you pick is probably based on your pocketbook.)
Speaking of which, I’m not an IE user. It’s catching up, but it hasn’t surpassed my experience with other browsers like Firefox or Chrome (although FF is getting chunky in a way that alarms me, but I believe version 4 is going to correct that). But it’s improving by leaps and bounds, and I think we should acknowledge the effort Microsoft is putting into burying the mistakes of their past.
If you’d like to check IE9 out, you can download the beta here.
Now if only we could install them side by side all the way back to 6 instead of running them in virtual machines… sigh
I am one of those people who are upset that IE9 is not coming to XP. I also don’t care very much about Safari 5 not being made available to OS X 10.4 users.
It’s simple, really.
Safari 4 (Right?) is available to 10.4 users. It’s not a bad browser. It supports more CSS3 than IE9! Furthermore, what is it, close to 95% of OS X users are on 10.5 or 10.6. So the effects of Apple not releasing Safari 5 everywhere are: Almost nothing, from a web dev point of view.
But Windows XP. Now there is a popular platform, still. (Largely, this is Microsoft’s fault, due to Vista.) And we know lots and lots of Windows users just use their default browser (IE).
So what Microsoft is doing is, in effect, guaranteeing that a significant portion of the Web will still run on IE8 for good while yet. This definitely affects how web designers and developers are going to approach their jobs.
In summary, Microsoft’s choice to not provide an XP-capable IE9 is directly holding back the web.
It’s funny – as a web developer I totally agree; XP is ancient. But being relatively new as an IT staffer for a medium (200+ employee) sized company, I get the other side now. We’re all on XP and IE7. Seven!! Because every small change in browser compatibility means a whole lot of phone calls from users.
Which path you pick is probably based on your pocketbook.
Or, you know, your employer. :\
(addition to comment above)
The users call because a change in browser version can (and does, in our case) a whole host of custom applications and older web sites that are being used for daily business by our users.
I see you’re point Kyle, but I have to agree with Alan Hogan here. Bigger marketshare means bigger responsibility and IE has a lot more catching up to do.
@Alan – Good points. So because Microsoft’s browser is more popular, they’re held to a standard (ensuring compatibility between browsers and OSes) that Apple isn’t required to do itself?
I want to make sure I understand you right. You’re saying the ethics of a company’s choice on backwards compatibility, open standards, or the desire to get people to upgrade their OS is directly tied to the percentage of market share that the company has?
Because iOS doesn’t support most of the web’s video (which is a constant annoyance to me), and Apple’s own Live HTTP Streaming they’ve been using on recent live webcasts aren’t supported on any version of Safari not on their own devices (or, for that matter, without their plugin). I’m not sure how a walled garden helps the web.
“Furthermore, what is it, close to 95% of OS X users are on 10.5 or 10.6.” I would love to see the source cited on this, but if it’s true, my point is: Windows XP is the most popular operating system in the US, probably the world.
As web designers, we’re expected to serve our audience. We can’t just decide not to support a browser just because it’s old and we don’t like it and we’d rather people used something else. If half our visitors prefer IE6 (god forbid), it’s madness to demand they upgrade.
Now, Microsoft is more or less on the opposite side of the equation. We make money based on visitors, while they make money based on upgrades, so we’re going to have a difference of opinion here, but it sure feels like we’ve been given the cold, blue shoulder. It’s up to us to make sure we support old browsers and OSs, even if Microsoft doesn’t.
The good side of this, though, is that maybe all those old XP users will upgrade horizontally by choosing a superior browser like Firefox or Chrome.
Here’s a question for those bringing up the (valid) support angle: how is MS’ refusal to supply IE 9 for your platform making it harder to provide support, assuming your organization is ‘stuck’ on XP? Moving to IE9 as a supported browser would appear to provide about the same level of headache as moving to a non-MS browser.
Well, Kyle, I don’t want to get sidetracked with iOS, which is a different discussion.
But yes, I do believe that corporate ethics are tied, if indirectly, to market share. How else will you provide the most good for the most people?
@Syd, I have to ask. Why don’t those custom apps simply use the X-UA-Compatible switch Microsoft provided for exactly this purpose?
Personally, I am simultaneously surprised and happy the IE dev team didn’t end up trying to port IE9 to Windows XP, even if it causes me some short-term hell. As it is, typography (the least understood and the most important part of web design) in web design is hell. Can you imagine XP trying to properly render a webfont? IE7 can’t do it, nor can IE8, hell, XP can barely do font rendering properly even with system fonts. (Ever actually look at the kerning in Times New Roman? It makes me want to punch kittens.) We haven’t even gotten to the the more advanced typographic modules in CSS3 yet.
XP was good while it lasted. No, it was more than that, it was fantastic. But in order to give any browser in XP a proper text rendering engine they might as well have rewritten half the graphics core. Even then, it’d probably be nowhere near the defaults on Vista or Win7. I just don’t see a good browser likely on XP, even Safari and Firefox suck at text rendering when in XP. Anyway, if they did, what would we be forced to do? Test in IE7, IE8, and IE8 for XP, Vista, and Win7? Would we be forced to OS sniff just so the text renders properly? No, thank you.
Hey you forgot to draw Opera moose running faster than IE9 !
Funny picture, but true.
:-)
Going to the IE9 beta site http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ I got a little pop up saying:
“This site functions in all modern browsers, but to see it as beautifully as possible please download Internet Explorer 9″
The other IE9 site from Microsoft, http://www.beautifulexplorer.com stops you before going forward saying:
“Our site is best experienced with Internet Explorer 9 beta. Get hardware-accelerated video and graphics when you install Internet Explorer 9.”
Apple and Google have done the similar with their HTML5 demos. I understand that browser vendors want to push their own browser, but it then damages their push for HTML5 in general when their examples don’t play well with other browsers.
Now the IE9 examples seemed to be working on Firefox for the most part. Some fonts seems to be off a bit, but since I can’t run IE8 and IE9 together (like you could do with earlier previews) I haven’t installed the beta myself to compare how the site looks on Firefox to see what I might be missing. However, the fact that I can’t see what might be missing good design.
Still, I would hate to return to the days with messages on websites saying “This site is best viewed with browser x”.
@Matthew – I completely agree. I think in the case of a vendor’s site, it’s an evil we’ll have to expect. Although the site seemed to look just dandy in other browsers for me. But in general I loathe the idea of returning to the walled gardens of the past, so hope no browser, including IE, gets that “best viewed in” habit to return to us.
@Alan It would be awesome if we could use the X-UA-Compatible switch and solve our application compatibility problems – but the root of our issue is autehntication methods allowed with Active Directory on WinXP vs. Win7 (NTLM vs. Kerberos), and less so the rendering of the browser.
@Matthew On the http://www.beautifulexplorer.com site it asks you to that even if you have IE9…
@Bernard your points presume that most XP users are web designers (or spend the bulk of their day looking at pretty web sites) – you couldn’t be more wrong.
Most XP users could care less about fancy font-rendering: they just want a computer that works so that they can process their Excel spreadsheets, write that report due on the bosses desk tomorrow morning, or perhaps get in a few minutes of Farmville on their lunch hour. The cost to upgrade a huge organization’s hundreds of thousands of computers is staggering. Even with bulk licensing it would likely cost millions of dollars to upgrade every computer, not to mention the overhead in manpower to transition users and support desk personnel – no, at that scale upgrading a computer’s OS isn’t as simple as driving to the Apple Store with your friends and buying the latest iThing.
Sadly, at that level Microsoft did not have a compelling enough reason in early 2007 to get large organizations to make the investment to transition to Vista (not to mention that many large organizations usually are not early adopters, so they hung back 4-6 months waiting for bugs to shake out) so that by the time most large organizations would even start contemplating the move (late 2008/early 2009) the economy had tanked big time. Moving to Windows 7 at the corporate level will take some time still, especially in light of the ongoing current economic times – if it ain’t (really) broken, why fix it? To get better font-rendering on boutique web sites? Uh, ya…
Microsoft should have released an XP version of IE9 for no other reason than to work on re-building the IE brand. So what if XP can’t take advantage of hardware acceleration and slickeroo font-rendering, it could continue to move the HTML5 ball forward in other ways.
Nope, lost opportunity IMHO
(Submitted via a corporate XP box – with no option to upgrade it…)
“You don’t see people complaining because Safari 5 isn’t supported on Mac OS X 10.4, do you?”
I figure it’s a rhetorical question, but yes; yes I do. I also see people complaining about the new Opera’s lack of support of PPC, causing them to switch to Firefox (which doesn’t release binaries anymore either, but at least you can compile it yourself). And I don’t even use or like Macs. ;)
First of all I want to say, that Apple isn’t in the OS-selling business, they design/sell hardware or full package (OS/hardware). Microsoft is in the OS-selling business and business software. Most of their money comes from Windows and Office I believe, but this could have changed because the price of Office has gone down a lot recent years.
Anyway, here is an up to date/current overview of the different versions of Mac OS X, based on visitors of websites, it exists to show which users of Mac OS X have a fix deployed for IPv6 (which went into 10.6.5). But it clearly shows those users which have 10.6 and have upgraded already. And those with older versions (possible stuck with PPC ?):
http://www.fud.no/ipv6/gnuplot/osxversions.png
XP is also the cause that SSL (https) on websites isn’t more widespread and hosting providers charge more money for it. This is because Windows XP doesn’t support name-based virtual hosting for SSL-certificates (called SNI). So every https-website needs it’s own IP-address, which means a lot of extra work/administration and so on. So all the users which use Safari or IE on Windows XP don’t have support for that part of the protocol, this is because they use the windows library which doesn’t support it.