IE9 To Support CANVAS Tag (plus VIDEO, AUDIO, and SVG)

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/ReleaseNotes/Default.html

by petercooper • 16 years ago

205 94 16 years ago

ie.microsoft.com

lhorie• 16 years ago

IE9 JavaScript Engine

Features Available

Support for ES5 specification in IE9 Standards mode, including support for

+ Enhanced Object Model - Accessor properties for JavaScript objects, Object.defineProperty, Object.defineProperties, Object.create, Object.getPrototypeOf, Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor, Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor, Object.keys, Object.seal, Object.freeze, Object.isSealed, Object.isFrozen, Object.preventExtensions, Object.isExtensible

+ New Array Methods - indexOf, lastIndexOf, forEach, every, some, map, filter, reduce, reduceRight

+ Other Computational Methods and Functions - String.prototype.trim, Date.prototype.toISOString, Date.parse, Date.now, Array.isArray, Function.prototype.bind

This just made my day

nailer• 16 years ago

Websockets are still missing though. :^(

weixiyen• 16 years ago

this sucks, but if they had to leave something out, that would be the one b/c you already get the same effect with long polling & streaming.

natmaster3• 16 years ago

As awesome as websockets are, websockets are an incredibly volatile standard in very early stages. The only shipping browser to support is (Chrome) does not even conform to the current draft.

lukifer• 16 years ago

Safari 5 supports WebSockets, and supposedly the nightly builds of Firefox do as well.

irrelative• 16 years ago

Given microsoft's history of browser releases, I'd prefer an out-of-date implementation that js libraries can wrap to a wait-and-see approach. It would be better than nothing -- websockets solve an important and annoying problem.

ambition• 16 years ago

The latest nightlies conform to the latest draft. And Safari 5 supports WebSockets.

But yes, it's an annoyingly volatile standard-in-progress.

Maciek416• 16 years ago

Wow, this is a tremendous piece of news. Not only is Canvas supported, but a huge list of other impressive standards-related stuff as well.

To boot, there will be support for ES5. I'm not up to date on where the other browser-makers are at this point, but could it actually end up that Microsoft will be the first out of the gate with a widely-distributed ES5 implementation?

lenni• 16 years ago

It would be great if Microsoft would start being embarrassed about their current browser offering and develop some ambition to make a great browser. It looks like they're trying.

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

I think they've gone from worrying about the web being a platform on top of Windows which commoditizes it to being worried instead that Windows won't even be a common commodity underneath unless they get their act together.

melling• 16 years ago

Competition is a good thing. People hate the idea of a Mac vs. PC "war", for example, but it was a good thing. In reality neither company really competes in OS's any longer. Neither Windows or Mac OS are really undergoing a lot of development these days. Apple and Microsoft are both content and off doing other things. Phones, tablets, games, databases, etc. Has all the interesting stuff been done with the OS?

narrator• 16 years ago

No doubt they'll add some special extension that uses perl for the drawing commands just so -- you know -- nothing but Ie9 can parse it.

csmeder• 16 years ago

In my opinion this is just Microsoft doing some hand waiving to confuse people. IE9 wont work on XP which means a majority of users won't have IE9 with in the next 5 years.

BY doing this Microsoft is able to say "Hey, we are standards compliant, we are the good guys now" and still actually be not standards compliant and prevent inovation on the web. To me this seems like normal Microsoft FUD[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

fname2• 16 years ago

Wow.. MS just can't win with some people.

IE6 and Windows XP are essentially the same age... Just as people need to upgrade their browser, they should be upgrading their OS.

code_duck• 16 years ago

I'm confident that XP usage will be declining significantly over the next five years.

It would be welcome if they wouldn't play the OS upgrade card with IE 9, though.Unlike something like Direct X, users won't feel the need to upgrade so they can use IE 9. I assume they decided it is too much trouble to make it work on XP, due to IE's OS integration? Other browser manufacturers don't and won't have a problem supporting their browsers on XP.

S_A_P• 16 years ago

wow, just wow. Is it the OS integration that makes people feel like they cant update their browser? Standards change and evolve- sure MS wasnt exactly on the forefront of web standards support but it looks like with IE9 they are actually making an attempt to stay relevant.

cracell• 16 years ago

Under video "<video> MP4 H.264 playback support, using hardware or software decoding. Support for WebM software is not included in this release."

Does that mean that IE9 is planning to support WebM? All I can find is mentions that IE9 can use codecs installed on the users computer but I can't find any commitment to WebM being bundled.

kenjackson8• 16 years ago

I believe WebM is not bundled. It will play it if the user has installed it: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow...

chc6• 16 years ago

Microsoft isn't bundling the codec, but they have promised to make IE9 work well with it. Halfhearted support.

tzs3• 16 years ago

That's called being technically competent, not being halfhearted. Codecs do not belong in browsers.

People want video outside of browsers. Should everything that wants to support video have its own built-in copy of every codec? That's bloated.

In addition to bloat, if each thing has its own implementation, there will be subtle (and probably not so subtle) differences in them. It will annoy users if their videos look different depending on whether they are in a browser, or they downloaded the file and are playing it in a media player.

If the codec has user-setable options, the user has to set their preferences in multiple places.

est• 16 years ago

Safari use Quicktime to playback H.264 on OS X all the time. If Microsoft is halfhearted they could have used WMPlayer control for all <video> and <audio> tags.

carson• 16 years ago

I think that statement is just an indication that they aren't recognizing the WebM content type yet in the video tag. I have tested this version of the preview with WebM Directshow installed and it indeed doesn't work yet.

kenjackson8• 16 years ago

83 on Acid3.

That's a pretty nice improvement for a team that says they're not focused on ACID. And Javascript perf actually appears to have improved. This is going to be some browser battle royale.

mahmud3• 16 years ago

No! Not a battle. A culture of rapid development will be set in motion where users learn to expect frequent browser upgrades to get the latest features, but where all browsers support today's suggested minimums out of the box. People already expect to upgrade TV sets every 2-3 years, and mobile handsets every 1.2 years, to get the latest features, why not browsers?

There will be no battle because no single browser has enough market share, both in terms of users and developer loyalty, to create a proprietary technology incompatible with the rest. IE's ActiveX crap is a remnant of an era past, the last vestige of the first dotcom. Since then, the developers have been moving towards the center and adopting standards. Not even ardent FOSS-heads had the stomach to release XUL apps into the wild, even for in-house stuff.

Today it's canvas, audio, video, geolocation, storage, etc. tomorrow you can expect some browser accelerated vector/numeric libraries, microphone support, webcam, phone sync, etc. I am not sure what's gonna drive it, but it could either be a portable hardware device, or a game, something that has to do with "having fun" or "friends", but it will push the browser further into desktop territory. The more resources web apps demand, the more browsers "cheat" and speed things up by bundling native hooks to provide that functionality. After blazing fast javascript, my first bet is on GPU accelerated javascript BLAS.

kenjackson8• 16 years ago

In other words... a battle! :-)

whatusername• 16 years ago

TV Sets every 2-3 years? Are you serious? Mobile Phones I'll give you in the 1-2 year range -- but normal people are not upgrading their TV every 3 years.

jmillikin3• 16 years ago

  <video>
    * MP4 H.264 playback support, using hardware or software decoding
    * Support for WebM software is not included in this release

  <audio>
    * MP3 and AAC audio support

Somehow, I'm not surprised that Microsoft once again chooses to be different from everybody else. I can encode in Vorbis and Theora/VP8 for Chrome and Firefox, or MP3 and H.264 for IE9, but there's no set of codecs which works on all three major browsers.

wmf• 16 years ago

Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia all seem to have the same policy on <video>.

jmillikin3• 16 years ago

The only browsers which matter are IE, Chrome, and Firefox. The market share of every other browser might as well be a rounding error.

kenjackson8• 16 years ago

What does Safari and Opera do?

tzs3• 16 years ago

Safari uses Quicktime, so it plays Theora fine if you have Theora installed for Quicktime. It will support WebM the same way.

chc6• 16 years ago

That isn't different from everybody else. That's the same as Apple.

tzs3• 16 years ago

Chrome supports H.264. Firefox is the one being different.

natmaster3• 16 years ago

Opera supports the exact same set of codecs as Firefox. You're the one being different. ;)

zyb09• 16 years ago

Yeees <3 you Microsoft, now I just need to wait 3-4 years till IE 6,7 & 8 dies and I can start using canvas.

drawkbox• 16 years ago

Maybe since they are helping kill off IE6, they will be smart and really be ruthless about keeping people on the latest browser.

It is in their own best interest to regain respect. It would be a very effective marketing campaign in the technology/web industries.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I believed so until recently, when I started to read about about action script (the stuff behind flash).

Action script is very close to javascript, close enough that it ought to be possible to write a crosscompiler so that you can give standards compliant HTML5 to chrome, safari and the mobile browsers and flash to IE and only editions of firefox y (since firefox stupidly does not include Chromes automatic update system).

harisenbon• 16 years ago

Interesting that you mention that.

I haven't played around with it too much, but the guy who (made? works on? is in charge of?) jQuery made a Flash=>JS interpreter.

http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

It's fairly nifty in the demos that I saw, and works on the iphone with no problem.

thristian• 16 years ago

ActionScript is almost exactly the proposal that Mozilla and Adobe put forward as ECMAScript 4, which was boo'd and veto'd by Microsoft and Yahoo. Hence we now have ECMAScript 5, née "Harmony", née "3.1", which is minimum-viable-upgrade to the current ECMAScript 3 without all the useful things that ActionScript added.

While ActionScript is similar to ECMAScript, the standard libraries they work with are very different, and most of the trouble of writing a Flash -> Canvas cross-compiler would be in trying to write an ECMAScript layer that could do what the Flash runtime does in C, with the efficiency of C.

jufemaiz4• 16 years ago

Finally!

Those of us poor suckers in enterprise can start doing quality work.

Now to build the business case for upgrading legacy apps :\

jufemaiz4• 16 years ago

Further: curious if this means that the .NET team in charge of ASP.NET are being introduced to far better ways to build web apps (no single form implementation, no mixing ID and Classes between back and front end, ditching the use of session as a "state" store, quality URI patterns etc)

ttrashh• 16 years ago

Asp.Net MVC for web has everything you just mentioned. The real push is towards Silverlight for web apps.

mrkurt• 16 years ago

Hardware accelerated canvas is pretty slick.

bd• 16 years ago

Are you sure about HW acceleration of canvas? I didn't find any mention of this in release notes.

I just ran few of my canvas demos in IE9 preview and while being pretty fast, they didn't seem to be HW accelerated.

Performance seems to be roughly on the Firefox level, which is less than Chrome and Opera (all current browsers do software rendering AFAIK).

Anyways, great news, web just got richer. Now let's start our prayers for WebGL ...

heyadayo• 16 years ago

"Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser." [1]

They have a demo linked on that page where I get 1 fps when I run in it chrome. Their screenshot of IE9 running the demo shows 60 fps. I suppose hardware can make a difference, but thats its a really impressive.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/06/23/html5-native-t...

equark• 16 years ago

Yup. On all the demos they have absolutely trounce Chrome. SVG too.

lowkey• 16 years ago

There you go Microsoft, now was that so hard? Now we can all play happily together. I almost forgive you for IE6 .. almost.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

The problem was not IE6, the problem was the gap after IE6. It was a pretty decent browser at the time.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

The problem now is that IE8 is going to be the new IE6. Failing to ship IE9 on XP is a huge blow to HTML5 and means all these cool things are going to be a long time coming to those of us who have to cater to as many users as possible.

gokhan• 16 years ago

I'll never forgive them for the lack of innovation after they won the browser war back than, against Netscape.

Web would be a totally different place if they continue improving IE versions with, say, a built-in DB, native push / sockets, enhanced JS api, more standards, more of everything.

(I'm a developer on the MS platform)

moe• 16 years ago

Good work Microsoft. Welcome to 2008!

nkassis2• 16 years ago

I hope they will in the future support WebGL. I'm building an app using it and would really like them to do so. It's not a deal breaker for us, our user base is mostly scientific users which don't usually mind having to install firefox/chrome/safari if they aren't already using it. With that said, one more browser supporting it can't hurt.

msie• 16 years ago

Awesome news! I'm shocked... Cross-platform support for cool canvas apps! Maybe this will encourage more canvas development!

endtime• 16 years ago

Gotta give them some respect for including the Opera 10.60 beta, which lowers their position and which they could have been excused for not doing.

I am really happy that MSFT is finally taking IE seriously.

bialecki• 16 years ago

Now I know how the diehard American soccer fans felt, crying after the US beat Algeria.

BonoboBoner• 16 years ago

Could IE actually become awesome? It certainly looks that way.

AndyKelley• 16 years ago

I wonder if they'll also fix dictionary implementation to be O(1)* instead of O(n)

* actually hash lookups are O(inverse ackerman) but that's kind of silly

Lorin• 16 years ago

Some amazing additions, the hardware acceleration is nice... but I find it funny that IE still doesn't support text-shadow even though most other browsers have been able to do so for a while.

Now that canvas is going to be supported by all the big names, my biggest nightmare is that it becoming a total flash replacement and all the kids using it to make really inappropriate design decisions. It's also really ripe for abuse in so many ways as you can practically design anything within its domain... a certain Stan Lee quote comes to mind :)

IE9 To Support CANVAS Tag (plus VIDEO, AUDIO, and SVG)

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