IE10 on Windows 7 available in November

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/10/17/ie10-on-windows-7-available-in-november.aspx

by shdon • 14 years ago

51 58 14 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good. The article about how they increased JS speed is particularly interesting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/06/13/advances-in-ja...

What worries me is that IE11 won't be out for another year, or longer, which won't be good enough.

shdon2• 14 years ago

True. For all the bitching about Mozilla's switch to a Chrome-like rapid release schedule as well as the "virtue" of having a stable target platform to develop against, by the time IE11 becomes reality, it'll have degraded from "really good" to "outdated" at the least.

drivebyacct23• 14 years ago

And yet everyday using it at work, the OS will boot, the cursor and HD will idle, I'll click IE10. I wait a few seconds and it appears to have loaded. I click in the URL bar. Wait. Okay, finally I can talk, nope, it loaded Bing and now it's stolen the focus on my text input. (Or vice-versa where the DOM is still largely unusable as IE render it).

Before I get a lecture on my computer, these were on brand-new-images of Windows 8 RTM that I was using on clean, very powerful machines. Chrome is still so responsive and snappy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the focus has been on JS and HTML5 and CSS3 but using IE still feels as much a chore as ever.

tammer• 14 years ago

I think you really nailed it - MS may have solved their benchmark/compatibility problem, but does 10 solve the UX problem?

Meai• 14 years ago

What annoys me personally on IE10, is that for some reason it autocorrects some words' first letters into uppercase. I assume it assessed that I'm from a german speaking country, but it does so in all texts, english included.

baddox• 14 years ago

> IE10 is really good.

I feel like people have been saying that for every upcoming version if IE after IE6. It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.

mun2mun• 14 years ago

Well IE10 in Windows 8 scored first at RoboHornet web performance benchmark which is released by Google http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/robohornet-pro-ie10-web-... .

cryptoz• 14 years ago

I have a Nexus S that shipped with 2.3 and did not have smooth scrolling. Then I got the OTA for 4.0 this summer and all scrolling was totally and completely smooth. I recently updated to 4.1, and scrolling is now significantly worse than it was when the phone shipped with 2.3.

> I'll believe it when I see it.

I saw it. Then I didn't. I don't know what to believe any more!

MatthewPhillips2• 14 years ago

IE10 has Grid Layout, a major change-the-way-you-develop type of feature, which no other browser has.

IE10 has IndexedDB, another major feature for apps, which only Firefox has the correct implementation of.

Among other things, IE10 is not really behind any other browser except with regard to WebGL which is very unfortunate. Of course, IE10 is really good today, but might just be "good" a year from now, which its still the most recent IE version.

drivebyacct23• 14 years ago

>It's kind of like how every new version of Android promises that they've "solved" smooth scrolling. I'll believe it when I see it.

Have you tried an Android phone at any point in the last 12 months? I absolutely do not believe that you have tried an Android device that ships with ICS or JB.

ericdykstra• 14 years ago

Does it render websites like every other browser, or am I, as a front end developer, going to have to keep adding <!--[if IE10]>, <!--[if IE9]> etc to catch their quirks?

richbradshaw3• 14 years ago

IE10 doesn't support conditional comments, which is a good indicator of their confidence that it works now. In my experience so far, if IE10 supports something, it works fine - no additional testing required.

pippy• 14 years ago

I've stopped using conditionals for anything newer than IE8. I still have to make workarounds for IE (usually by just fiddling with the CSS). IE9 is far from perfect and is still a timesink, this is time that could be spent making resources reusable or optimising content.

udp• 14 years ago

I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?

joenathan• 14 years ago

Yeah, and they should get rid of Office while their at it, I mean we already have Open Office, nor should they stop there they should get rid of their closed source operating system, I mean we already have open source Linux distros. They should get rid of Windows 8 and just contribute to Ubuntu!

brudgers• 14 years ago

We've got Windows and Linux, Apple should just drop OSX.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

IE9 and 10 are rendering my canvas test suite faster than Chrome dev or canary.

I just ran the tests again:

Chrome Canary: 809 tests in 15.714 seconds

IE10: 809 tests in 11.383 seconds

FF16: 809 tests in 26.768 seconds (wtf? this used to be on par with chrome, might be a gpu option I disabled)

edit: Firefox times were off because I apparently had disabled GPU ever since this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387

Unfortunately the Firefox canvas bug is still there for non-gpu users. Both FF and Chrome have ignored nearly all non-security canvas bugs that I've filed :(

no_gravity• 14 years ago

I have seen a drastic decrease in FF performance for canvas related operations too. Some time after FF12 it became about 4 times slower. Here is a little test page I made to see if it gets fixed:

http://www.gibney.de/firefox_canvas_performance

Until it gets fixed I use chrome.

Now its FF17 and its still slow.

whatever_dude• 14 years ago

Yeah, but in 5 years, how good will this "good" be? We'll still be dealing with it when that time comes.

JohnsonB2• 14 years ago

>IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good.

I'd have to disagree. Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Does it have in browser spell-checking? Large library of secure addons? Built in PDF viewer? Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) IE 9/10 has essentially no modern end-user features other than tabs, which are arguably ancient.

kineticflow• 14 years ago

>Does it have bookmark/password syncing?

Yes.

>Does it have in browser spell-checking?

Yes.

>Large library of secure addons?

No.

>Built in PDF viewer?

No. (Although, Windows 8 does have a reader app)

>Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?)

Yes.

It sounds like you've never used IE10?

mtgx• 14 years ago

Just for Windows 7? So now they are giving up on supporting Vista, too? Going by this trend, IE11 will only support Windows 8. Meanwhile, Chrome and Firefox support all Windows versions up to XP.

Indyan2• 14 years ago

They gave up Windows XP with IE 9. Keeping the same trend, they are giving up Vista with IE 10. In fact, Microsoft is actually getting worse. They are already treating Windows 7 users as second class citizens. IE 10 for Win 7 will only get a preview release in mid-november. Final release will probably come a few months after that. In comparison, Opera still supports Windows 2000, although it recommends at least using Windows XP.

xradionut2• 14 years ago

"They are already treating Windows 7 users as second class citizens."

Really? How so? Will I be frisked when I attend the NTSSUG meeting at their facilities tomorrow? Or do I have to open my laptop and show the Windows 8 image running in VMWare to gain entry?

If IE 11 and a few shitty "Formerly known as Metro" apps is the only thing that Windows 7 users are missing, I wouldn't call that discrimination.

jetti• 14 years ago

Seeing as mainstream support for Vista ended in April of 2012, I don't see this as a big shock.

richbradshaw3• 14 years ago

Also, Vista usage is already hovering at around 10-12% of all users, so as Windows 8 is released we should see that number decrease gradually.

rhplus• 14 years ago

Chrome and Firefox aren't interested in selling OS upgrades, which means they're not going to cannibalize their own sales. If we look at the closest comparison (i.e. OSX/Safari), it looks like Windows/IE is doing a little better with respect to the duration of the platform support. The version of OSX released at the same time as Windows 7 is Snow Leopard (10.6) and it doesn't look like it'll be getting any more Safari updates (last one was 5.1.7 in May 2012, current is 6.0 on 10.7 and 10.8 only).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history#Version_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_versions

leeoniya• 14 years ago

the comments over there pretty much sum up my general sentiment since they went silent about IE10 on win7. every one of their blog posts has comments asking wtf.

mratzloff2• 14 years ago

Nice, I'll be upgrading my VM. IE 10 lets you switch between IE 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 modes. Interesting that 6 isn't in there. IT 9's compatibility modes are super useful for testing.

hdragomir• 14 years ago

Careful, you'll be updating your VM to a preview.

Might want to wait on that a bit.

xradionut2• 14 years ago

He can always update a copy of the VM.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

That's the beauty of virtual machines. You take a snapshot, you experiment to your heart's content. You don't like where you are, one click and 3 seconds later, you're back to where you started with absolutely zero data loss.

drzaiusapelord• 14 years ago

Even Microsoft can't work with IE6. It really is incredible how almost a decade of stagnation and bad ideas, as well as poor corporate policies, hurt the web and IE for so long.

benholmen• 14 years ago

Similarly, IE9 allows you to select IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE9 Compatibility Mode. In my experience these browser modes are not identical to their stand-alone counterparts. If you are serious about finding and fixing layout bugs for IE7/IE8 users, you really should roll an XP VM for each of those browsers. Notably, IE8 users commonly browse in IE8 Compatibility Mode which has its own quirks as well, and it's completely unavailable in IE9.

I wish I didn't have to know this stuff.

melling• 14 years ago

Are they going to continue with the silent updates for consumers? In 6 months, IE9 should be in the low single digits and IE10 should be the most widely used IE browser.

notatoad• 14 years ago

Since when do they do silent updates? I heard they were pushing out IE as a recommended update via windows update, but don't you still have to click through the massive IE installer to actually perform the upgrade?

richbradshaw3• 14 years ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16214912 apparently from Jan 2012.

mmuro• 14 years ago

This is good, I guess?

I have never understood (even when I was a Windows user) why they locked most of their browser upgrades to the OS. This is perhaps the greatest reason why their market share falls every year.

smhinsey• 14 years ago

It's usually because it's tied to some sort of OS-level new feature. In the case of IE10, it's the rendering engine for (some kinds of) Metro style apps. If you're providing infrastructure for some new features, it's easy to rely on other new infrastructure, and pretty soon you can only run on the new OS. It probably was a serious effort to back-port it like this, although it's also possible IE10 represents a new model that changes things.

elorant• 14 years ago

Because that was the way to put Netscape out of business. By tying the browser with the OS they made sure that every new PC would be running IE. In the long term of course this was an awful decision since upgrades come once every couple of years.

Although I'm a .NET developer I sincerely hope that IE dies. IMHO it is the worst mistake MS ever made, by slowing down upgrade cycles that much they managed to alienate every web developer/designer out there by making their life miserable trying to fix pages that didn't work in IE.

the_mitsuhiko• 14 years ago

Because the IE component is a core component of the operating system that other apps can rely on.

alpb• 14 years ago

I have recently joined Microsoft and on my work PC I am happily using IE 10 for a while (evenings, I am a Safari OS X and Chrome user). It just works great, does not over consume memory and resources, provides a seamless experience as good as competitors. frankly, lack of plugins issue still exists, though. IE is no longer a pain in the ass for developers. My blog (html5, responsive CSS) works just fine on IE.

Disclosure: these are not my employer's opinions, only mine.

IE10 on Windows 7 available in November

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