IE9 Preview Delivers New Features and Impressive Performance

Microsoft is progressing to the next phase of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) development today with the launch of Platform Preview 3 (PP3) of the next generation Web browser. Developers can download the latest preview to get a sneak peek at what's in store with IE9 and what new functionality Microsoft is incorporating.

IE8 is the reigning king among Web browsers--it leads in market share and in market share growth rate--but, IE9 is generating considerable interest. The IE9 Test Drive site has had more than 16 million visitors, and Microsoft reports that the IE9 Platform Preview has been downloaded over two million times.

With the latest release of the IE9 preview, the Microsoft developers have added support for HTML5 Canvas, and HTML5 audio and video tags. The new HTML5 functionality enables IE9 to deliver interactive content and online video on compatible browsers--similar to what you might expect from Adobe Flash, but without the need for any third-party application or browser plugins.

I spoke with Rob Mauceri, principal group program manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, and he walked me through the improvements and capabilities of IE9. Microsoft also put together a short video you can watch, demonstrating some of the capabilities of the IE9 PP3. The video shows some joint development effort with IMDB, and with Amazon illustrating how seamlessly IE9 can scroll through the available options and play video clips natively within the browser.


Aside from fun bells and whistles, this latest release in the IE9 development process shows off some speed and performance improvements as well. According to the SunSpider benchmark test, IE9 PP3 comes in at 347 milliseconds overall--outperforming both Chrome 4 and Firefox.

IE9 also includes support for CSS3 Font Face and Web Open Font Format (WOFF)--rendering a wider range of fonts with better clarity. The IE9 demo video shows a page in IE9, and a similar page rendered in the Google Chrome Web browser in which the fonts are all jacked and misaligned. The Acid3 score for IE9 has gone from a 68 with PP2 to an 83 with PP3.

IE9 combines the Chakra JavaScript engine, with support for multicore CPUs, dedicated GPUs, and hardware video acceleration to deliver exceptional performance. Microsoft is able to deliver flawlessly smooth animation at very high frame rates with IE9. Throughout the demo video, Microsoft does side by side comparisons demonstrating how IE9 looks and performs compared with competing browsers, and the results appear to be compellingly in Microsoft's favor.

I asked about an ETA for a public beta of IE9. Mauceri was predictably elusive--essentially saying that Microsoft is working as fast as it can, but is also focused on ensuring a quality product and is not prepared to announce availability dates which might force developers to march to the beat of artificial deadlines that could compromise quality or performance.


SOURCE:PCWORLD.COM

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Firefox 3.0 Update Coming This Week

Mozilla will take another stab this week at convincing users running older versions of its Firefox browser to update to version 3.0, the company said Tuesday.


On Thursday, Mozilla plans to offer Firefox 3.0.5, the most-up-to-date edition, to users of Firefox 2.0.0.18, the latest version of the company's 2006 browser. The offer will be the second so-called "Major Update" presented to users since Mozilla launched Firefox 3.0 in June.


The first offer was triggered in late August, and was accepted by more than 50% of the people using the older Firefox 2.0 at the time, Mozilla said.


Currently, three-fourths of Mozilla's users are running Firefox 3.0, according to data released Monday by Web metrics firm Net Applications Inc. During November, Firefox 2.0 accounted for 4.8% of all browsers used, while the newer Firefox 3.0 held a 15.6% market share.


Mozilla will repeat the original offer, which let users choose between accepting the update, postponing it 24 hours or declining it. In August, declining the offer meant that Mozilla might repeat it at some later date, something still possible after Thursday's offer.


"Right now, we're planning on doing one additional Major Update offer in early 2009, with slightly modified text that explains to users that (at that time) Firefox 2 will no longer be supported," said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in an e-mail Tuesday.


As Beltzner noted, Mozilla plans to drop support for Firefox 2.0 after it releases a final set of security patches for the older browser; that update, Firefox 2.0.0.19, is now slated to appear two weeks from today, on Dec. 16. The last two security updates -- Firefox 2.0.0.17 and 2.0.0.18 -- patched a total of 26 vulnerabilities in October and November, respectively.

Some users reported problems with several Symantec Corp. consumer security products, including Norton 360, after updating to Firefox 3.0 in August. At the time, Symantec urged users to update their Norton-branded software on Windows PCs before trying to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.


Users who decide Thursday that they would rather return to the older version will still be able to download Firefox 2.0 from Mozilla's Web site and reinstall it.

source:pcworld.com

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Chrome Grabs 1 Percent of Market in Under 24 Hours

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1 percent of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today.

Both Net Applications Inc., a U.S.-based tracking company, and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1 percent less than 24 hours after its launch, passing rivals such as the current Opera and the ancient Netscape in the process.

"This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen in a post to Statcounter's blog on Wednesday. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.

Net Applications also tracked Chrome's debut, and echoed StatCounter's numbers. "We saw them peak at 1.48 percent last night, and they're hovering around 1 percent currently," said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, in an e-mail Wednesday morning.

According to Net Applications, which is tracking Chrome's hourly numbers, Google's browser jumped from zero to 0.4 percent during the hour it was released yesterday. Nine hours later, at midnight EDT, Chrome accounted for 1 percent of the browsers used to visit the 40,000-some sites that the company monitors for clients.

As Vizzaccaro noted, Chrome peaked at 1.48 percent early Wednesday -- 4 a.m. EDT, 1 a.m. PDT -- and as of 11 a.m. EDT, held a 0.98 percent share.

"I'm certain usage will increase at night and on weekends, as companies won't want people testing Chrome at work," Vizzaccaro said.


Net Applications typically sees the same cyclic behavior from Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, which jumps in share on weekends and during off-work hours.

Vizzaccaro wouldn't speculate on what browsers Google Chrome's users may be leaving. "We won't know that for a couple of weeks, as most people will test it along side of their normal browser for a while," he said.

With 1 percent of the market, Chrome immediately overtakes Opera Software ASA's Opera, which Net Applications pegged with 0.74 percent at the end of August, as well as the moribund Netscape, which the company said accounted for 0.72 percent of all browsers used last month.

AOL LLC, Netscape's owner, killed it last February when it issued the venerable browser's last update and urged users to switch to Firefox or Flock.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer held 72.2 percent of the browser share last month, said Net Applications earlier this week, while Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple's Safari owned 19.2 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.

Google launched Chrome Tuesday around 3 p.m. EDT. Currently, a version for Windows XP and Vista is the only one available for download. Chrome, which is built on the WebKit rendering engine -- the same open-source code used by Apple Inc.'s Safari -- features a privacy mode, a combination address-and-search bar, and runs each tab as a separate process to prevent a single site from crashing the entire browser.



source:pcworld.com

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Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8

Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld

Vs.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

To that end, Google has designed an almost completely new Web browser. In fact, other than the core rendering engine -- which is based on the open-source WebKit standard of Safari fame -- everything in Google Chrome constitutes a rethinking of how you engineer a browser application. For example, with the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process -- a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application.

Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process and then leveraging the built in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won't necessarily take down the entire browser -- the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple Web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers' fears.


Double Stuff Browsers

Of course, few technology ideas are truly original, and the case of the multi-process, tabbed browser is no exception. In fact, Google can't even claim to be the first to market with this model -- Microsoft beat them to the punch by a week when it released its own take on multi-process browsing in the form of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Like Chrome, IE 8 uses multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. However, while Chrome takes a purist approach and literally launches a new process with each opened tab, IE 8 uses more of a hybrid model: It creates multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process but doesn't specifically assign each tab to its own instance. Thus a look at Task Manager under Windows will show an equal or greater number of Chrome instances than running tabs, whereas IE 8 will generate a fewer number of instances -- for example, six copies of iexplore.exe to support 10 discrete tabs -- and share them among the running tabs.

How these two variations on a theme will hold-up in the real world remains to be seen. My take is that Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust, but at a cost in terms of resource consumption. In fact, both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development -- browsers chewing-up more memory than their host OS -- is something I documented in my Enterprise Desktop blog earlier this week. At the time, I was shocked by how bloated IE 8 had become, consuming 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Then I evaluated Google's Chrome and my expectations were reset yet again. Not only did the "fresh start" Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually "out-bloated" IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8's 211MB (you can read more about these test scenarios at the blog).

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC's memory consumed by Web browsing, and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we'll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you're going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on Web-centric computing.

To be fair, I must mention that both IE 8 and Google Chrome are still in the Beta stages of development. Chrome, in particular, is in its first public test release cycle, while IE 8 is only now being made available in a "feature complete" form (previous IE Betas were notably short on innovation). And it's also important to consider all of the non-architectural changes that these browsers bring to the table -- most notably, enhanced rendering performance and usability.



source:pcworld.com

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Microsoft's IE Market Share Drops Again

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld


Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today.

IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month.

But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed "Chrome," that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today

According to California company, IE accounted for 72.2% of the browsers used in August to access the 40,000-plus sites Net Applications monitors. That was a drop of about 0.9 percentage points from July, and a departure from the month before, when IE maintained its share for just the third time in the past year.

IE's August drop was the second-largest for the year, lower only than May's 1.1-percentage point fall.

"I can't really explain what happened," admitted Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing. "Perhaps there was some relationship with the launch of IE8 Beta 2. If users are looking at IE8, maybe they're looking at other browsers at the same time, trying to decide which one to use."

Meanwhile, Firefox increased its share by about half a percentage point, climbing from 19.2% in July to end August at 19.7%. Other browsers also boosted their shares: Apple's Safari went from 6.1% to 6.4%, while Opera's share hit 0.74%, up slightly from July's 0.69%.

Within IE's and Firefox's totals, however, there were shifts from one version to another.

As Vizzaccaro hinted, Microsoft's share for its IE8 browser -- still in beta -- leaped by almost 500% in just a few days. Before the Aug. 27 launch of IE8 Beta 2, the browser accounted for only 0.04% of all browsers connecting to Net Applications-monitored sites. By Tuesday, IE8's share had climbed to 0.22%.


The number of users running Firefox 3.0, the latest version of Mozilla's open-source browser, also jumped last month, moving from 5.7% in July to 7.7% by the end of August.

Mozilla started offering Firefox 2.0 users an update to Firefox 3.0 last week. Not surprisingly, Firefox's month-to-month gain came in increases to Firefox 3.0's portion of the browser's share.

IE7, officially released in October 2006, slid slightly in August, falling from July's 47.1% to 46.8%. It was only the second time that IE7 lost market share in the last 24 months, according to Net Applications.

The even-older IE6 continued to lose share in August, ending the month at 25.2%, off from July's 25.7%.

Google Chrome, which debuted Tuesday around 3 p.m. Eastern, accounted for 1.04% of all browsers as of 1 p.m. Eastern today, said Vizzaccaro.

"But their numbers will be a lot easier to grow quickly," he said, "than, say, Safari or even Firefox did." Vizzaccaro cited Google's name recognition and dominance in the search field as two reasons why it would be able to show rapid uptake for Chrome.



source:pcworld.com


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