IE9 | The Coffeehouse

magicalclick

I just started playing Facebook game like FarmVille, and not I no longer like IE8, I want IE9 or eventually I will switch to Chrome. The thing is, when FarmVille loading the farm I can't switch tab in IE8. And Chorme can switch tab when the farm is loading. If may be like 10 seconds depends on how many things inside the farm. And the feeling of my entire IE8 is stucked loading that farm really disappoint me. The tab/process is already separated, so I would I even get forze up by a busy tab? No matter what happen to the tab, I should be able to do whatever in IE, like switch tab, close tab, press refresh button, or press tools menu or so on. Instead, when the tab froze, it froze IE as well. Of course when I termincate the tab, I didn't terminate the IE at all.

So it really bugs me. When I terminate tab, the IE is still alive. When the tab crashed, other tabs are still alive. WHY WHY WHY it froze IE GUI? It just doesn't make sense for me. It is already another thread, then, why in the world IE is still being affected and yet unaffected by the tab at the same time? I really don't get it. To even make that possible is like..... seriously, how can you make that happen? Sometimes I think some people are born to be good at being terrible.

Anyway, I really don't want to switch. But, IE is really getting outdated. One day, I have to let go. And finally start using other browsers. Waited for better IE since IE6 SP2 when everyone start switching to other browsers. At this point IE8 is only manageable, just like Vista. I am not sure how long I can hold on to this.

contextfree

Since one of your choices involves waiting 2+ years ...

but who knows, maybe they'll fix some issues in a service pack.

I don't think IE8 is overall that much more outdated than other browsers btw, though I prefer Chrome.

spivonious

I'm liking Opera 10 the more I use it. IE8 does seem to have freezing troubles when loading certain pages.

magicalclick

In reply to contextfree

#Sep 20th @ 3:58 AM

It may not be outdated THAT much, but, it wasn't update enough for you to choose IE over Chrome. Wink I think the program just need a fresh of air. Like Chorme frees up so much screen spaces in comparison. And IE seems to be the only one without a download manager. The problem is a lot of time you forgot where you saved the download because you thought it was set to desktop, but, sadly it was to other place the last time you did it. Stuff like this really isn't effecient. And most casual user will just feel frustrated on things going missing. And it doesn't have spell check.

And they claim IE8 loads pages faster like 0.05secs. Seriously, I don't care about that. But, I care about the performance of the browser itself. Like browser responsiveness. When I open 20 links in tabs quickly, hehe for FarmVille gifts thing, IE8 gets lagged and I couldn't click the link as I as I wanted to. Stuff like that just makes IE feels slower.

Yeah, I am waiting for IE9 now. They may think IE8 is a good offering, but, it just doesn't quite cut it.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to spivonious

#Sep 20th @ 8:37 AM

Definitely. I can't recall a single instance wher the supposed per-tab process thing saved me. When a page freezes, the browser freezes, without exception.

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

In reply to Bas

#Sep 20th @ 11:08 AM

Agreed, mostly.

It does save you from addon generated DEP crashes however. But 9 times out of 10 the UI dies too and then attempts to re-load the broken pages when you restarted your browser. Fun.

contextfree

In reply to magicalclick

#Sep 20th @ 10:25 AM

It was update enough that I'd now pick IE over Firefox though, if Chrome didn't exist.

magicalclick

In reply to contextfree

#Sep 20th @ 11:48 AM

I guess that's a good start. Time to wait another 2 years. Angel

androidi

My short bug fix list for IE9: Fix by very least 1) the freezes (+ add freeze isolated tabs) 2) slow/cpu-intensive scrolling (content dependant, large MB-sizes scaled down static&animated images seem to cause it) - this slow scrolling shows up even in top half of the Channel9 home page but everyone may not notice it - sample cpu use during scroll and compare to opera&ff! 3) download files direct to target volume instead of temp atleast optionally. Size of downloads and bandwidth has increased faster rate than hdd transfer rate.

LeoDavidson

I bet 99.9% of browser freezes are caused by Flash.

I wonder how much money and development time, that could've been spent doing cool stuff, is used up by companies trying to workaround and minimise the impact of Adobe's bugs in Flash and Reader? Smiley

I know that I personally spent several days over the last couple of weeks just to get Adobe's PDF preview handler to work properly under x64, and actually do things like tab-cycling (not like it's one of the five or so things that are explicitly part of the preview handler API contract... oh wait it is but Adobe can't read API docs!), oh and unimportant things like, you know, actually painting their goddamn window after it scrolls.

I guess it became a fun puzzle game, trying to work out how to trick their PoS code into behaving properly, and I got to write my first keyboard hook*, but I kinda wish Adobe had done their job properly in the first place so that I could have spent my time doing something new instead of cleaning up a massive-but-useless company's mess.

(*Whose bright idea was it for the Windows hook API to not pass the full MSG structure to hooks and, in particular, not pass any information about which window the incoming message was sent to? That's on top of it having no user-data argument... You just hook a thread (which could be pumping messages for 50 windows for all you know; it's not my source, else I wouldn't need to hook it) and then your function, running in a completely foreign process, just gets sent the lParam and wParam arguments, essentially. From those alone, it seems, you have to somehow determine the context yourself. Crazy. Unless I missed something when using the API for the first time... OTOH I was kinda amazed that it did work in the end and I could intercept those tab keys. Now I look forward to the joy of certain stupid anti-virus tools calling my program a keylogger because it dares to intercept the tab keys sent to a child window that happens to be owned by a separate process. Smiley I put in a config option so people can disable the hooks, just in case.)

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

My main idea for improvement in IE9 would be increasing support for W3C technologies, like SVG, canvas, HTML 5, etc.

But this is as a person that develops for IE but doesn't use it. Smiley

magicalclick

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Sep 20th @ 7:15 PM

Before we have SVG, I think we need to have alpha chennel support on PNG files. And really, I think IE needs a download manager, just a basic one.

jon_potter
jon

In reply to magicalclick

#Sep 20th @ 10:28 PM

IE has supported PNG alpha for quite a while now I think.

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

In reply to jon_potter

#Sep 21st @ 3:13 AM

Since IE7. Not exactly “for quite a while now”. Wink

AndyC

In reply to TommyCarlier

#Sep 21st @ 3:29 AM

Well since October 2006, which is going on for three whole years. I'd say that's "quite a while now"

magicalclick

In reply to jon_potter

#Sep 21st @ 3:13 AM

Really? Somehow mine gets black backgrounds on my website. Crying Maybe they converted the image when I upload. Still it is good to hear that it is not IE, but my site.

stun

Farmville....The game is fun to play to waste time while at work, but its UI is very slow as hell.

Stupid rendering speed and responsiveness feels slower on IE.

I am not blaming it on IE only, but I am sure the coding for Farmville is a POS (piece of ....).

Combined together, the final user experience sucks in IE.

Is it only me? Lately I am experiencing a lot more frequent browser crashes due to the Flash Player.

Is it because the Flash Player is a mess (or) the developers who made those Flash don't know what they are doing?

jpalvaradom

IE9 == Gazelle ?

contextfree

In reply to jpalvaradom

#Sep 21st @ 12:31 PM

IE9 = IE8 with some new features and bugfixes and performance improvements (and/or new bugs and regressions), I'm sure.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to jpalvaradom

#Sep 21st @ 12:31 PM

false

stun

In reply to Charles

#Sep 21st @ 3:08 PM

Charles,

here is my prediction about IE9...

IE8 = pretty decent, but it is not enough to use it as my primary browser.

IE9 = better than IE8 in terms of security and standards support, but still won't "WOW !" me like Chrome did.

Here is the breakdown of my browser preferences.

Chrome ...... lightweight + blazing fast. I like the [Tabs] at the top a lot. Very minimalist.

FireFox ....... feature-rich + very nice for web development.

IE ................. slow + not-responsive enough for me. Use it only when Chrome and FireFox "fails" to render it.

IE9 will be NOT that different from IE8 other than better standards support and security.

It still won't be make me happy enough to switch back to IE as my primary browser.

However, there is a small part of me that is really wishing for an IE9 that will blow me away and switch back to it.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to stun

#Sep 21st @ 4:24 PM

What makes you think that you know what IE9 will be? Smiley Like Windows 7, there will be no disclosure until the dogs are let out. So, you can keep guessing with no context or you can wait until ******* to find out Smiley

It's fun to play the guessing game, though. I get it.

C

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

In reply to magicalclick

#Sep 20th @ 10:28 PM

Another thing I would like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

APNG adds animation extensions to PNG. Firefox and Opera support it.

magicalclick

In reply to Charles

#Sep 21st @ 4:30 PM

I want to say something, but it is so bad. So, all I can say is, I don't expect IE9 to by mind blowing as well. IE has being waighted down by legacy code base, legacy design, legacy standard supports (tons of them), and legacy user base.

1) Legacy code base (easy fix, just recode)

2) Legacy design (easy, just redesign)

3) Legacy starndard spports (extremely hard. Tons of standard supports and apps running on it. Consolidating it is just scary)

4) Legacy user base. Sadly people will complain when a button is moved from left to right. And the complain is "it breaks, it is not working".

ShiningArcanine

Why not install Firefox?