They actually came out and said "building a new browser for the ten-year old version of Windows that came with IE6 didn’t make sense to us because of the limitations of its graphics and security architectures." Considering IE 9 dropped support for XP, I don't think they consider it "news" that IE 10 won't support XP.
Why? Everyone else is supporting XP with no major problems. Meanwhile, MS has the source code for XP, and for some reason can't replicate that success?
It's over 10 year old operating system already. Software has its shelf life. I can't blame them for wanting to not spread their support matrix too wide.
I don't blame them for trying to kill it off. Truly. It's been long enough, especially now that 7 is actually a solid upgrade for nearly every use.
But I do blame them for all the under-handed, customer-spiteful tactics they've used. DirectX 10 on Vista only, though it's almost 100% compatible with DX9 (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run). IE9+ on Vista/7 only. It's complete bullshit, through and through, and I see no reason to defend their methods.
> (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run
The only games with which this will work is games that support DX9 explicitly and, for some reason, disable it. The D3D9 and 10 APIs are completely different. Having worked on an implementation of DX10 for XP, I can say for sure that this is 100% incorrect.
That was my project, and not very well haha. It worked, if you consider a lack of shaders, lighting (IIRC), and other critical things to be "working". Shaders were a PITA for a few reasons, not the least of which being that the D3D10 shader bytecode was completely undocumented. Spent a couple months doing nothing but reversing the bytecode format, and things sort of fell apart after that. All the code's out there, though, as is the complete story of the project and the company around it: http://daeken.com/alky-postmortem
I'm not entirely convinced mimicking anything Microsoft puts out is a good idea, even under the best circumstances. I've lately been getting pretty far into .NET, and the more I see, the more it terrifies me.
I'm on the fence with them supporting XP. One comparison to take into account is Safari's releases have dropped support for an older OS, much less than 10 years, they did change processor architecture though and have less business users to support. Also Microsoft offer free support.
I don't think they are criticising, I think they are making the point that they aren't the only ones who think you can't do hardware acceleration in XP. Whether that statement is true or not is irrelevant.
The only native experience of the Web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9.
I'm leery of the word "native" in this context. It strikes me as a marketing phrase with little or no actual meaning. They're trying to sell me on the idea that my HTML5 experience will somehow be better because it uses code provided by Windows itself rather than by some intermediary library. But what is that windows code, if not a library of code?
I think it is a brilliant marketing term. yes they hijack the term "native" but if in fact they can deliver, it will be a clear differentiator in users' mind, like this:
IE10 = native = fast
Chrome = not native = slow
Simple message, and it works IMHO.
I'm watching MIX'11 live and so far the demos are great (like the fishbowl benchmark, completely blowing Chrome's fish out of the water ;D) but they are still just demos.
"Faster" is not the holy grail metric. Standard compliance and well-thought-out interoperability are high on my list.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to use a dog of a browser, either, but in modern times with dual-core this and 8GB that, one would probably have to actually work at it in order to have a genuinely slow browser.
yeah, that was the actual intent of Chrome as far as I understand it and it has worked.
Look at Firefox 4, you can't say it wasn't influenced by Chrome. And the fact that Microsoft is now trying to move faster with IE10 already being announced is probably also largely influenced by Chrome's fast paced development.
We now have a better faster web. We just need it to be standardized a little more (Come on Microsoft, please add WebGL support)
True, but MS will always try to steer people toward their own services, so it's not a complete win. But definitely better than having people on IE6 trying to use Gmail, or even search for that matter.
It's a "brilliant marketing term" in the same way that any falsehood is. Other IEs have also been "native" in that way, yet they are dog slow, so "native = fast" is clearly wrong. "IE10 = fast" would skip the lie and seems like just as good a differentiator.
True, but "fast" is a crowded concept in people's minds. If you look around the web you'll read that Firefox 4 is fast, Chrome is fast, Opera is fast. IE is "native" which is then connected with performance claims. It's a new name for an old feature that has a kernel of truth to back it up. I'm reminded of an early scene in Mad Men where a salesman convinces a cigarette company to advertise their tobacco as "toasted". Sure, so is everyone else's, but that doesn't mean that one company can't own that idea in the minds of the public.
A similar thing thing with the IE blog's new favorite phrase "same markup" which seems to be "standards compliant" in a new blue dress. Search the web for 'standards compliant browser' and you'll generally find folks heaping scorn on IE and praise on all the others. Search for 'same markup browser' and the opposite is true.
Or NativeClient. Ironically it contains several runtimes although "Native" in this case means non-web programming languages for the client-side. Remember the HTML component is a runtime.
It may be a brilliant marketing term but for us technical guys it sucks - from now on we have educate everybody we meet about what the term "native" really mean.
Not to talk about all the wrong decisions that will be made based on this.
Its so native to win vista/7 that it does not support windows xp which Opera/Firefox/Chrome ALL support WITH their performance improvements AND they've done so while staying ahead of IE9.
I guess if that's native, yes IE9 wins. I think in user's minds: if its built for MY operating system specifically its better than the other. However thats not true as even the tech unsavvy are flocking away from IE.
HOWEVER. I am glad to hear this news. It only means one thing. PROGRESS.
I suspect their messaging is driven by internal politics as much as it is by external marketing imperatives. "We are a vital, integral part of Windows and should therefore be heavily funded".
In the sense of using the platforms' libraries and APIs, then Chrome is not native (especially some of the UI as Javascript is not native in any sense) because it comes bundled with its own runtime as well as the WebKit runtime. But in terms of systems languages they are using yes that is native.
I think "native" means they can leave supporting new features everyone else has had for years until a new version of the OS comes out, rather than being bound by this silly "upgradeable" thing.
In discussing why IE9+ will not be available for XP, they write:
Others have dropped support on Windows XP for functionality that we think is fundamental to performance.
This is completely disingenuous. What they are actually referring to (and link to) is Google disabling GPU acceleration and WebGL on XP starting in Chrome 10.0.648.114 due to stability issues. Importantly, Google intends Chrome 11 to re-enable these features on XP for known-good drivers. Here is the relevant ticket:
The thing is, I actually agree with Microsoft's decision to not support XP. XP, like IE6, is a fundamentally flawed platform and the sooner people move off of it, the better. I just wish they'd make the argument honestly.
1. All this talk about 'Native' is basically propaganda. There is no such thing. All modern browsers generate native code when running JavaScript, and most use GPU acceleration to render content (for example, Firefox uses Direct2D, exactly the same as IE9). IE9 and 10 are not more 'native' than other browsers.
2. I am impressed by the work on implementing new standards - kudos to Microsoft. But I did not see anything about WebGL, which is a very important standard that is already implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (soon, or already) Opera.
WebGL won't happen until it makes its way into the HTML spec. Historically MS hasn't been supportive of Khronos standards. And I don't really know of any customers important to MS that are demanding WebGL.
IE9 renders nice and quickly but in contrast to their claims of speed, I've found their DOM manipulation to significantly underperform in contrast to the other browsers. Firefox 4 and Chrome 10+ are able to create and insert large numbers of new elements at the same time significantly faster than IE9, while IE9 stutters and lags under the same conditions.
It's good that they will keep working on IE, but since they will only release these "previews" for a year, that means new features will always be way earlier in Chrome and Firefox (soon) with their fast release cycles. IE10 will launch with features that Chrome and Firefox will have 10 months before.
I really hope that Microsoft starts to shorten their release cycles. Releasing once every few years made sense in the 1980s and 1990s. Not so much today.
That is a fast release cycle for Microsoft! It's a step in the right direction. Microsoft is a giant cruise ship trying to compete with speed boats. It won't happen over night, but hopefully it either does happen or they give up. I still feel this is great news overall, it shows Microsoft is aware of the situation. If they ever do truly remedy this (and by remedy I mean a very fast IE release cycle, ideally with automatic updates like Chrome does) it will take them a while to get there. I'm just glad they appear to be slowly turning this cruise ship around.
I think they also want any impromptu benchmarks people run to be as fair as possible. To the best of my knowledge, the latest FF and Safari both have all their supported hardware acceleration turned on by default.
I've met some members of the IE tech team (who don't control the marketing). The people I know really want to win without cheating and support as much as possible, but are very wary of releasing anything too early. They're very careful to wait until the standards are pretty precise and stable before releasing an implementation, lest they be accused of trying to "sabotage" something with an unintentionally different (but still within the vague spec) implementation.
IMHO Safari actually has the best hardware acceleration. Chrome-dev channel is catching up quickly.
By hardware acceleration I'm talking about things like -webkit-transform and the support for various 3D transforms. I'm unsure of how it's implemented under the hood but I know Safari kills on 3D transforms and the best part is it works on mobile.
Mere support for CSS transforms is actually really limited. What IE9 and Firefox 4 do on Windows 7 is accelerate all drawing and layer compositing. What it means is that as the browsers gain support for CSS animations and such, they get accelerated for free. Stuff like Canvas and SVG also get accelerated. See http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/.
It's good that Microsoft is viewing integration into it's OS stack as a way to squeeze out performance but if that also doesn't translate into an accelerated ship schedule then who cares.
FTA: "... CSS3 Multi-column Layout (link), CSS3 Grid Layout (link) and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout (link), CSS3 Gradients (link), and ES5 Strict Mode in action. We also demonstrated additional standards support (like CSS3 Transitions (link) and CSS3 3D Transforms (link)) that will be available in subsequent platform previews of IE10, which we will update every 8-12 weeks."
Oh, hell yes! CSS gradients and animations/transforms? Christmas came early this year. This version can't come soon enough.
You will be able to use them without those prefixes as soon as the W3C agrees on the final implementation of a standard and as soon as the respective browser implements said standard perfectly.
Browser prefixes are actually a great idea that save us from the madness of the old days (like browser hacks) and there is nothing bad about them.
Isn't the reason for the vendor tags that the features aren't part of the official spec? I'd guess the answer would be once they become official or you start generating your CSS. Doesn't even have to be that fancy, just something to run over a css file and duplicate a declaration a few times in all the different formats.
Probably something you should look into, I don't expect there to come a point where vendors stop adding new proprietary properties, at least not this decade.
Those properties are not proprietary (the vast majority at least). There is a draft spec for most of them but agreement on the final implementation doesn't yet exist. Browser prefixes give vendors the ability to test said draft spec in the wild and correct course if necessary. They also make sure that differing implementations don't make the lives of web developers hard for decades. They are a great idea, actually.
I guess proprietary was the wrong word for what I was saying about the properties. It wasn't my aim to imply that they were proprietary features, just a lack of knowing a better term to refer to the property names.
Going by the rest of the article, I'm assuming by native HTML5 they mean hardware accelerated compositing? Good for them if so, but 'native' is definitely the wrong word to use, and the development channel of Chrome has supported hardware accelerated compositing for quite some time.
It still creates buzz. The biggest problem is getting people to upgrade. IE6/IE7 can't die soon enough. People on XP who are stuck on IE8 might start feeling abandoned and switch to Chrome or Firefox.
FlexBox, transitions, gradients, and 3D transforms... glad to see progress continuing to be made -- and they were demoing it on an ARM processor. Cool.
I've seen people mention that the demo runs on ARM, but I can't see how that works.
As there is no build of Chrome for Windows ARM as far as I know. And the things isn't available from Mozilla either, which I assume would be the Firefox-button in the tray at the bottom.
It's at about 2:03:48 in the Mix stream. There is no Chrome or FF logo in the taskbar. Its the machine they use to do the last demo. It's not the machine used in the picture on the website linked to from this story.
It's not in the platform preview 1.
Neither are css transitions or 3d transforms, but their messaging indicates they are coming in a subsequent PP release.
I'm not a regular Windows user, but it seems like many even more tech savvy users continually fall for this same cycle of BS from MS. The users frustrated with IE 7 were excited about how much better IE 8 would be. It turned out, IE 8 had many of the same rendering weirdness that IE 7 had. Then came IE 9 to save the day. Only it doesn't do nearly as well supporting HTML 5 features as Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
So now here comes IE 10, and what's the pitch? It's gonna be damn fast. Who gives shit? Chrome and Safari are blazing fast AND you don't have to through all kinds of hacks, and html5.js at them as they work perfectly as is, with nearly ALL of the HTML 5 specifications.
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I posted this on their comments: "Please, Microsoft, don't try to confuse people by hijacking the word "native". An HTML 5 application does not run on a magical HTML 5 CPU, even in IE9 and IE10. Being single platform may allow you to develop IE faster but it is not an advantage for the user."
Is that Rob Mauceri speaking in the Video? I saw him at a round table at the Web 2.0 Expo last month and Douglas Crockford and Alex Russell tore him a new ass about Ecma Script 5 strict mode. Looks like he got out of the building alive and actually listened. Cool
Native is to browsers as Open is to Mobile OS. That is a great catchy phrase that will get the tech blogs lots of page views while the fans argue about whose definition is more correct.
I am liking the pugnacious tone. I suspect that with IE9 shipped, they feel they've earned the right to make a forceful argument on how browser development should happen.
"Hey kid. Releasing a new version every few weeks ain't professional."
I thought that was called "Agile Development." What's unprofessional about it? I'd say it's a lot more professional than letting your browser stagnate for years, leaving security holes unpatched, etc.
As for "how browser development should happen," I think the people who can make the argument on that are the ones who've been leading the pack for the last 5+ years, not the ones who are still trying to catch up despite starting out with a giant lead.
"Unprofessional" is not the same thing as bad, and I wish people would use more descriptive terms in its stead. What, exactly, is bad about having several release streams with varying degrees of speed and stability?
Just an example: they claim that Chrome "dropped support on Windows XP for functionality that [IE Team] think is fundamental to performance." Linking to this blog post: http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/02/dev-channel...
The reality is that Chrome disabled it temporarily on the dev channel due to crashing, and in fact brought it back for v11: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72975
Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge the fact that they don't even have a version of IE10, or even 9, for Windows XP!
Is this really what the browser wars are going to come to? Lies and marketing? I thought we were over that.