[Auzy]

Certainly looks as though Microsoft are finally willing to try to take on the competition (they are actually flaunting the progress of ACID3, and posting benchmarks).

In fact, its interesting that their new engine is so fast. Its going to get very interesting, especially since personally, I couldn't give a damn about supporting unfinalised standards the ACID3 tests (in fact, one of the ACID3 tests can't be passed 100% of the time anyway).

Speed is important, and since a lot of applications use the IE engine, maybe this will speed up some other applications as well.

Btw, I can confirm their sunspider benchmark.. Their preview does run faster than Firefox on my system (although, unsure if my addons are having an impact on that, or external causes). As its just a preview, it should only be taken with a grain of salt anyway..

[ecaron]

I don't think anyone has ever questioned Microsoft's ability to take on the competition - or even beat the competition as they did in the Netscape wars. Rather, I think we're permanently jaded against the IE browser not because of its technical merits or flaws, but because they let it go stagnant.

Knowing that people using Windows 2000 are stuck with IE6 - despite the fact that their machine still suits their needs - is why we need to continue to push people away from IE. Even if IE9 is amazing.

Firefox 3.6 STILL works on Windows 2000 (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.htm...). Until Microsoft releases a browser we know isn't going to put us in the "I can't upgrade past IE6" situations that we hear about, I'll proudly support everything that isn't Internet Explorer.

(Note: Has anyone ever tried to submit a bug report to Microsoft? It is impossible! I even put together http://crashie8.com/ as a proof of concept, and I still can't get anyone to acknowledge the problem!)

[pavs]

I think we should all take a moment to thank Google for making Chrome and get all browser developers to get out of their collective ass and do something to fix their broken browsers. The amount of improvement and works going on the top 4 browsers since Chrome was released is really amazing. IE 7-8 were half-assed job to counter Firefox's popularity.

Even Firefox is getting their act together and their next release is very much inspired by chrome.

[jriddycuz]

Agreed. But I find it amazing that a browser that has roughly a 5% user share has had so much impact. I surmise that it's really the weight of the company behind Chrome that has scared its competitors more than the adoption of the browser itself.

[InclinedPlane]

The marketshare in the general public (the 5%) is almost inconsequential. The general public doesn't build websites for a living. The marketshare amongst tech professionals is more significant, and there Chrome's numbers are much higher. More so, Chrome's marketshare, even among the general public, is growing quickly, only a fool would ignore the significance of that.

Also, marketshare is not necessarily the primary motivator for every developer. A lot of the Firefox developers are motivated to put the best browser possible out there, regardless of marketshare, the fact that there is a leaner, meaner, faster browser even exists (even if the marketshare was less than 1%) might be enough motivation for them to innovate.

[hartror]

I seem to remember scaring the competition into movement was one of their stated goals. They wanted their sites to be more usable.

[techiferous]

I'm actually amazed at how quickly Chrome gobbled up 5% of the market.

[latch]

I think a lot of us question "Microsoft's ability to take on the competition." Maybe not from a technical point of view, but certainly from a bureaucratic, entitlement and motivational one.

[saikat]

>> Rather, I think we're permanently jaded against the IE browser not because of its technical merits or flaws, but because they let it go stagnant.

Partly - I think we are jaded because of technical flaws as well, even in their later versions. IE8 was supposed to be their modern browser, and it still had no canvas support and horrible JS performance.

Otherwise, I agree with you - even if IE9 is a huge hit and awesome, a lot of developers supporting IE won't really have a better life.

[InclinedPlane]

I think there's more to it than that. Somehow Google managed to build a top tier, highly standards compliant browser "from scratch" in a short matter of time. Much less time than IE development has not been stagnant, for example. And yet the work and the decisions of the IE team continue to disappoint. They have made some good choices and improved IE a great deal, but they are catching up slower than the other browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera) are pulling away.

More so, there doesn't appear to be any significant sense of urgency in the IE team related to just how far behind they are. Firefox has revolutionized its Javascript engine, massively increased standards compliance, and added support for next generation html5 and css3 features. We'll be lucky if IE9 manages to support css 2.1 correctly, let alone implements html5, css3, or comes out with a competitive javascript engine.

Microsoft seems to be pretty complacent in regards to IE because it still dominates marketshare. However, the decline of Myspace shows just how quickly marketshare in the online world can change.

[rbranson]

Hardly from scratch at all. The base work was done by the KDE team as KHTML many years ago and then Apple put the finishing 50% in with WebKit. By the time Google came along, WebKit (aka Safari) was already a force in the market. Google's biggest contribution thus far to the current browser wars was the V8 engine, which significantly raised the bar for JavaScript performance.

[InclinedPlane]

You may have noticed the quotes I put around "from scratch" in an effort to forestall responses just such as yours. Yes, I realize that they built on a substantial amount of existing work, but every project does. The point is that they did nothing that nobody else could do, there's nothing stopping MS from using WebKit in IE9. The fact that a relatively small number of total developer-hours compared to the efforts having been expended for development of IE7 and IE8 can translate into a top-tier web browser is significant.

[rbranson]

The Internet is such a terrible medium for communications subtleties. I agree though... but imagine how that would look from a PR perspective. Microsoft is, essentially, the anti-thesis of open source.

[isleyaardvark]

It's not so much the stagnation, or even the technical flaws, it's the lock-in. That's the ultimate source of most people's problems with IE, it's the tight integration with IE6 and enterprise apps. That's why dealing with IE6's technical flaws is still a problem, it's difficult for users to switch due to lock-in. That's why MS's browser development stagnated, they had obtained the browser share and got lazy. And that's why standards are important.

[derefr]

And the solution to that is pushing out a security update that turns IE6 into something like Mozilla Prism, where you have to set it up for each individual enterprise site that relies on it, and can't use it for "free-range" browsing. Pack that update with an alternate-browser-download tool as well, with a system-tray alert saying "Your computer will no longer be able to connect to the World Wide Web until you have selected a browser to install" every hour or so. I think they just don't want to start up the pre-XP updating machinery again.

[jodrellblank]

Why would they? Windows 2000 is ten years old, that's longer than the security patch support period of RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, Debian, Solaris (and Windows 2000).

Why would or should they go back to developing a free browser for an out of support system which will mess up the user's system as a deliberate side effect, for the benefit of some arbitrary web developers?

[derefr]

It's not really support for their old browsers, though—it's User Experience support for their new ones. Banishing IE6 allows all websites more freedom to use modern formats and specs. Modern formats and specs give them something to compete on in IE9.

To put it another way—if there was an update they could release to Windows 2000, at this point, that people would install voluntarily, but would make more people buy Windows 7 as an effect, don't you think Microsoft would be all over that?

[rimantas]

  I couldn't give a damn about supporting unfinalised
  standards the ACID3 tests 

MS too sometimes speaks of Acid3 in dismissive terms as having little relevancy. Let's see and then decide by yourself, is this stuff important:

  DOM2 Core
  DOM2 Events
  DOM2 HTML
  DOM2 Range
  DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, …)
  DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker)
  DOM2 Views (defaultView)
  ECMAScript
  HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, …)
  HTTP (Content-Type, 404, …)
  Media Queries
  Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic
  changes, …)
  XHTML 1.0
  CSS2 (@font-face)
  CSS2.1 (‘inline-block’, ‘pre-wrap’, parsing…)
  CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), …)
  CSS3 UI (‘cursor’)
  data: URIs
  SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, …)

(Taken from: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/)

Looks important to me.

[Auzy]

CSS3 isn't a finalised standard, and the test only tests a few things. You do realise there is a lot which this doesn't test too right? That's why some browsers took so quick passing ACID3 (because they focused on fixing the cases tested by ACID3 only)

And as mentioned, one of them is a speed test which is affected by external circumstances.

I'm not saying its irrelevent, but I am saying that a 100% pass rate doesn't mean its 100% compliant with the things being tested. Furthermore, we shouldn't be punishing companies which aren't willing to implement support for standards which are drafts.

ACID2 was genuinely useful because it was all finalised standards. ACID3 though I think could have done better.. So its nice to pass, but a 100% pass just says you are compliant with 100 tests. I'm betting the compliance testing suites used by browsers are a LOT more comprehensive..

[rimantas]

  CSS3 isn't a finalised standard, and the test only tests a
  few things. You do realise there is a lot which this
  doesn't test too right?

That's exactly my point: Acid3 test the important bits, the parts of the spec which are useful. This test is web apps oriented (hence a strong focus on DOM manipulation and dynamic behavior) and thats where web is heading now.

[tedunangst]

        I couldn't give a damn about supporting unfinalised standards the ACID3 tests
    ...
    HTML4

Saying HTML4 is important in reply to a comment about unfinalized standards is a bit of a non sequitar, no?

Personally, no, I don't give a damn about SVG, but I'd be pretty upset if my browser didn't support iframes. Does the Acid3 test weight its tests appropriately?