IE9 Early Look: It’s Not Perfect, But I’m Glad It’s Coming
Posted by Kyle Weems on November 18, 2009Dean “Good Luck Pronouncing It” Hachamovitch (who stars in the old, old CSSquirrel comic Passion of the Dean) made a post on the IEBlog today giving us an early look at IE9 and the improvements it’ll contain. These improvements contain (but are not limited to) improved CSS3 support, better-looking fonts, hardware acceleration, better standards support and faster performance. Woo!
But some, like Dave “Maximus” Shea, aren’t impressed, as he makes clear here.
I get it. We’ve been hit in the face by Internet Explorer so many times that it’s impossible to think well of it. But the increasing speed at which they’ve started to bring out new versions, and the clear improvements of 8 over 7, have me convinced that what they’re doing is a good thing. Yes, there’s no mention of canvas support. Yes, some of these features were supported years ago elsewhere. But they’re trying hard to improve, and more importantly, they are improving.
So, I for one am glad to see this announcement. It makes me happy. Also, I secretly hope that if the version numbers keep going up on IE, certain stodgy corps will be shamed into updating past IE6.
Hey, a guy can hope. Right?
Tags: dave shea, dean hachamovitch, illustration, internet explorer
It’s the problem with corporations. The turnover and bureaucracy can be so great that they appear schizophrenic.
I’d like to think that most of the people who brought us the stagnation of IE6 were replaced by forward-thinking individuals. If one looks at what’s happened, recently, we can see that the people at Microsoft have put a tremendous amount of effort into making IE better in the last two versions. IE8 is good enough that I’m not going to complain if I notice someone using it, and it hasn’t caused me any real troubles.
So I hold high hopes that Microsoft, a corporation that can bring us well-designed applications (more recently, and when they actually put themselves to it) might make something that works at least as well as the rest of the browsers. Their whole style has changed in the last few years. But they’ve got a lot of negative brand to wade through.
Look at those evil red eyes!
I’m with you. I’m certainly not a fan of IE, but in 7 and 8, they managed to remove a lot of pain for web designers. I rarely have big issues with it, to be honest, as far as css and html goes. If I did more complex javascript or whatever, maybe there’d be a problem.
The only thing I really want at this point is for IE6 to die. Not a slow and painful death. Just quick and easy. That’d be just fine.
I don’t know… IE has been such shit in the past that anything good or decent that comes out of it I consider it bonus and receive it with arms wide open
I’d be more than happy with just an up-to-date CSS3 implementation, to be honest.
I love how IE6 is an evil monster, but it’s successor is just a little dumb baby…
How’s the state of things, by the way, does IE9 (and IE8 for that matter) default to semi-standard-IE7-style-quirky mode and we have to use a meta tag to force it into standards mode, or does it just work with a standards-valid html page?
@Michael & Naomi – I agree. It’s not that they haven’t done bad in the past. They clearly have. But 8’s improvements are such that it paints a good picture at their intent going forward in improving.
@VeoSotano – IE9 isn’t out yet, Microsoft is just giving an early look at some features. IE8 will, with a standards-valid html page, almost always produce something that looks proper and behaves as you’d expect it to behave. I virtually never need to use conditional comments to fix any issues. It does, however, have deficiencies in CSS3 support and doesn’t support the styling of new HTML5 elements (without a JS-based fix), so it will have a different experience (square corners, etc). This isn’t a bad thing, but it has to be accounted for.
Yeah, woot for IE9, but when we at work still have to cater for our browser of “choice” which is IE6, I cannot stress how much stress this delivers to our IT-department… We all want the Brave New World browser, but management says no – IE6 is our company standard. What to do? Anyone got some tips which will stick at a departmental level (government)?
I would be glad if IE doesn’t come at all.
It must be that the developers of IE are nephew’s of Bill gates…
anyone who has an influence, please beg them to step out of this project.
Are Microsoft being a bit cheeky in their IEBlog post? In their example image for border-radius they use a “double” border. Has anyone tried a using a double border with a border radius in Safari? It’s not pretty.