Microsoft today released the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the public. The release is meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to Web developers while at the same time providing feedback to the IE9 team. Microsoft says it is committed to updating the Platform Preview to keep a more effective rhythm for discussion, and it will be updated every eight weeks or so. Microsoft will share feedback with standards-setting bodies in addition to using it for internal development.
The Platform Preview is a minimal wrapper: it's not a full-fledged browser. It has no tabs. It has no address bar. It has no back button. So what is included? Everything that Web developers need to see: the rendering engine, of course, as well as the new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration features, and the developer tools. The IE9 team told Ars that each update will use one of the latest internal engineering builds, at which point the feedback loop will start again.
In short, Microsoft has found an alternative to having nightly builds, answering a long-standing criticism of its development process. Microsoft believes its solution is better, as it doesn't have the hitches that come with nightly builds.
We asked Microsoft why it chose eight weeks as the update period. "We found that eight weeks is the minimum amount of time for the feedback period to work and actually resolve issues," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of IE told Ars.
Regardless of whether updates every eight weeks will be frequent enough, it is certainly an improvement over the IE team's previous stance of releasing one or two betas and one or two RCs over the space of many months.
In addition to the rendering engine, the Platform Preview has a start page where Microsoft showcases five Speed Demos, five HTML5 demos, and five Graphics Demos. Naturally they all work better, or at least as well, in IE9 as in any other browser; Microsoft isn't going to show off tests where its browser isn't as good as the competition. We were impressed with what Microsoft had to show off (we saw 28 tests in total, not 15), but there is still room for improvement. Microsoft agrees, which is why it is being a little more open about feedback and frequency of updates.
"We love HTML5 so much that we want to do it right," Hachamovitch told Ars. Microsoft is putting a huge emphasis on HTML5 with IE9, but its approach is still very strict. Since HTML5 is not complete, and likely won't be anytime soon, the IE9 team is being very careful about which features it implements. Other browser makers aren't concerned about implementing a part of HTML5 one way in one version, then changing it in a subsequent version, and then changing it again... Redmond, on the other hand, is taking the same approach with IE9 as it did with IE8: support the current Web while pushing the new Web forward, according to Rob Mauceri, Principal Group Program Manager of IE. "Our approach to it is, let's really get the standard right," Mauceri told Ars. He admitted, however, that standards change and that it is quite likely there will be parts of HTML5 that change even after IE9 is released.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the IE9 team has made (some) progress in the Acid3 test. IE8 scores 20/100 on the test, and the IE9 build demonstrated at PDC scored 32/100, so given that the IE9 build from MIX10 is at 55/100, we can see Microsoft is certainly taking standards a lot more seriously.
The company's stance on the test, however, has not changed. Microsoft refuses to simply give in and implement everything the test requires to pass; the company continues to downplay the test as it barely encompasses HTML5 but instead tests some technologies that are still in the "working draft" stage of standardization, including many edge cases and error conditions. While Microsoft has no plans to score 100/100, it is not ignoring the test; instead, the company is focusing on what it believes developers actually want supported. "As we support more of the markup, our Acid3 score will go up," Hachamovitch told Ars.
Microsoft's stance is debatable. The Acid3 test, even if not that useful, is nonetheless influential. IE's continued mediocre score creates the perception that the browser is far behind its competitors, and will likely do little to lessen Web developers' dislike for the browser. It's also another barrier to convincing the world Microsoft truly cares about standards.
We did see one cool HTML5 feature we weren't expecting: IE9 working using YouTube's implementation of the HTML5 video element. This actually required a little tinkering on the part of the IE9 team, since the YouTube HTML5 Video Player has no support for browsers other than Chrome or Safari. Even so, it worked brilliantly. Microsoft admitted there is still a little work to do in this area, however, so today's release of the Platform Preview won't work with YouTube HTML5, but the software giant promised a later build will.
As you can see, only Basic Shapes and Paths are done today. Microsoft is promising to have a lot more done for the IE9 release, and while it has started most of those, it hasn't begun work on a few of them. Microsoft is not expecting to implement the last three in IE9 at all. The "Yes" in the IE9 column means that 95 to 100 percent of the implementation will be done, according to Microsoft. What Web developers have to know about the Platform Preview today is that SVG available on the Web will simply not look right, but Microsoft is promising to finish it to a point where it works.
When asked about SVG Fonts, which some other browsers implement, Microsoft answered that TrueType fonts work better, and so the company does not see it as a priority since there really is no need for yet another way to do fonts in SVG. SVG Fonts are very sophisticated in terms of API, but not very important in terms of uses out there, in Microsoft's eyes.
Microsoft cited the number of image editors and applications that currently have the option to output as SVG as one of the many reasons it decided to back the specification with IE9. The company also showed off how the included Developer Tools let you edit SVG just like editing HTML. That means developers can very easily debug problems with SVG.
"A lot of sites are sniffing for IE and rendering their content as Vector Markup Language (VML)," Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager of IE, explained. "We want them to stop doing that and start rendering as SVG." Development of the VML format ceased in 1998, but it's included in IE5 and higher. Microsoft even released a VML to SVG Migration Guide (880KB) today to help developers. As a result, many websites don't bother to check for the version of IE, and simply tell all versions not to render the SVG, something that will have to change with IE9. For example, Google Maps currently uses VML for vector paths when it detects IE and SVG for all other browsers.
The Sunspider benchmark, a suite developed by Apple's WebKit team, is not all-encompassing, but it is the de facto test for comparing JavaScript performance across different browsers. Microsoft is using it to show off the progress it is making with IE9. Four months ago the software giant showed that the test suite took less than half the time to run on IE8 compared to IE7, and also that it took about a quarter of IE8's time to run on an early IE9 build. IE9's brand-new JavaScript engine Chakra, which compiles JavaScript into native code, is still improving, as you can see in the test shown above. At the time, IE9 was still behind Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, but it was just barely trailing. In the meantime, Opera 10.5 was released and took the crown, so now let's see how IE9 has progressed.
It's worth noting that Opera 10.10 was released in November 2009 and Opera 10.50 was released this month. During the same timeline, Microsoft showcased two different IE9 builds: one at PDC09 and one at MIX10. Opera wins in two areas: the progress made in the SunSpider tests as well as the release of two final versions (as opposed to just demoing early builds).
According to data compiled by Microsoft, the Platform Preview has somersaulted over Firefox, but is still behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera 10.5. The above test was only performed once: after running it multiple times and taking the average, Microsoft says IE9 had a score of 834 at PDC and has a score of 599 at MIX. "Our internal engineering build score is even higher," Weber told Ars.
Johnson also offered an interesting tidbit about battery life. Since the GPU uses fewer watts, he noted that longer battery life can be achieved. Still, he made sure to emphasize that Microsoft was not claiming IE9 would result in longer battery life, but he did say it shows up in certain benchmark tests designed to see how well the browser can handle graphically intensive HTML5 code. The improvement is more noticeable on low-end laptops and netbooks than in gaming laptops with expensive graphic cards.
All this hardware talk brings us to an interesting question: will low-end computers be able to handle all this hardware acceleration that Microsoft keeps boasting about? Microsoft says yes. While the improvements are more noticeable as you move up the hardware tree, even really cheap machines with integrated GPUs are perfectly happy with the way IE9 works. In one example, Microsoft brought out a nettop and showed how well IE9 could play two HD videos in the same webpage using HTML5 and hardware acceleration. Other browsers, meanwhile, failed miserably as the CPU just couldn't keep up.
One of the demos that the IE team is eager to show off time and time again is called "Flying Images," the first one under "Speed demos." Quite simply, it is a JavaScript app that shows the logos of the five major browsers rotating in a circle. The logos follow your cursor, or at least they do in IE9. All other browsers have trouble rendering the logos in one way or another, and they can only use one core of the CPU (usage would max out at 50 percent very quickly). A few sacrificed speed for image quality: IE8 managed to get 4-5 FPS, Chrome was a 2-3 FPS, and Safari grabbed 5-7 FPS. The rest sacrificed image quality for speed: Firefox was at a steady 60 FPS and Opera was at around 50-55 FPS but both rendered the images horrendously. Only the IE9 Platform Preview was able to deliver a constant 60 FPS without sacrificing image quality. While it could use both cores, it didn't come anywhere near to maxing out either of them as usage remained under 10 percent, and RAM usage was also noticeably lower. This is because the majority of the work was quickly relegated to the GPU.
In another demo, Color Management, Microsoft made sure to show how high it was placing the bar. IE9 supports ICC versions 2 and 4 (IE8 supported neither). By comparison, Firefox supports ICC version 2, Safari supports version 2, and Chrome doesn't support either. The team also says it will have IE9 support TIFF images as well as JPEG-XR (a Microsoft format formerly known as HD Photo).
Today's release is aimed at developers: Microsoft wants them to open their website with it, hit F12 (which opens up Developer Tools), and just play around. It's disappointing, however, that the company is only sharing under-the-hood changes and isn't showing off anything GUI-related. The progress made from IE6 to IE7, and IE7 to IE8 was just as much front-end as it was under-the-hood. We're not really concerned where the refresh button will be placed in IE9, but we do care about what UI features the company is planning to include, not to mention improvements to how tabs work as well as the address bar. Developers must also be briefed on what will be happening to the compatibility button that lets users make IE8 render the page similarly to how IE7 would (Microsoft recently revealed that the compatibility list has been cut down from 3,100 sites to 2,000).
This lack of information about IE9 would be bearable if we had some kind of timeline for the browser, but Microsoft insists it doesn't yet know when it will be ready. IE6 was tied to the release of Windows XP, IE7 was tied to the release of Windows Vista, and IE8 was tied to the release of Windows 7. Will IE9 be tied to the release of Windows 8? Microsoft isn't saying; the company won't even tell us if the browser will be ready this year or in 2011—or even when we might expect a beta.
The Platform Preview is a minimal wrapper: it's not a full-fledged browser. It has no tabs. It has no address bar. It has no back button. So what is included? Everything that Web developers need to see: the rendering engine, of course, as well as the new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration features, and the developer tools. The IE9 team told Ars that each update will use one of the latest internal engineering builds, at which point the feedback loop will start again.
In short, Microsoft has found an alternative to having nightly builds, answering a long-standing criticism of its development process. Microsoft believes its solution is better, as it doesn't have the hitches that come with nightly builds.
We asked Microsoft why it chose eight weeks as the update period. "We found that eight weeks is the minimum amount of time for the feedback period to work and actually resolve issues," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of IE told Ars.
Regardless of whether updates every eight weeks will be frequent enough, it is certainly an improvement over the IE team's previous stance of releasing one or two betas and one or two RCs over the space of many months.
In addition to the rendering engine, the Platform Preview has a start page where Microsoft showcases five Speed Demos, five HTML5 demos, and five Graphics Demos. Naturally they all work better, or at least as well, in IE9 as in any other browser; Microsoft isn't going to show off tests where its browser isn't as good as the competition. We were impressed with what Microsoft had to show off (we saw 28 tests in total, not 15), but there is still room for improvement. Microsoft agrees, which is why it is being a little more open about feedback and frequency of updates.
HTML5
As you can see in the screenshot above, the IE9 team has made (some) progress in the Acid3 test. IE8 scores 20/100 on the test, and the IE9 build demonstrated at PDC scored 32/100, so given that the IE9 build from MIX10 is at 55/100, we can see Microsoft is certainly taking standards a lot more seriously.
The company's stance on the test, however, has not changed. Microsoft refuses to simply give in and implement everything the test requires to pass; the company continues to downplay the test as it barely encompasses HTML5 but instead tests some technologies that are still in the "working draft" stage of standardization, including many edge cases and error conditions. While Microsoft has no plans to score 100/100, it is not ignoring the test; instead, the company is focusing on what it believes developers actually want supported. "As we support more of the markup, our Acid3 score will go up," Hachamovitch told Ars.
Microsoft's stance is debatable. The Acid3 test, even if not that useful, is nonetheless influential. IE's continued mediocre score creates the perception that the browser is far behind its competitors, and will likely do little to lessen Web developers' dislike for the browser. It's also another barrier to convincing the world Microsoft truly cares about standards.
We did see one cool HTML5 feature we weren't expecting: IE9 working using YouTube's implementation of the HTML5 video element. This actually required a little tinkering on the part of the IE9 team, since the YouTube HTML5 Video Player has no support for browsers other than Chrome or Safari. Even so, it worked brilliantly. Microsoft admitted there is still a little work to do in this area, however, so today's release of the Platform Preview won't work with YouTube HTML5, but the software giant promised a later build will.
SVG
Speaking of implementing more features in later builds, let's take a look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an XML-based file format for describing static and dynamic 2D vector graphics. The 800-page standard has been in development by W3C since 1999, but only earlier this year did Microsoft join W3C's SVG working group and promise to collaborate on future versions of the standard. Now, the company is getting a little more specific about what it's going to support in IE9:| Functionality | Platform Preview | Internet Explorer 9 |
|---|---|---|
| Document Structure | Partial | Yes |
| Basic Shapes | Yes | Yes |
| Paths | Yes | Yes |
| Text | Partial | Yes |
| Transforms | Partial | Yes |
| Painting Filling Color | Partial | Yes |
| Scripting Styling | Partial | Yes |
| Gradients and Patterns | Partial | Yes |
| Clipping and Masking | No | Yes |
| Markers and Symbols | No | Yes |
| Filter Effects | No | No |
| Declarative Animation | No | No |
| SVG Fonts | No | No |
When asked about SVG Fonts, which some other browsers implement, Microsoft answered that TrueType fonts work better, and so the company does not see it as a priority since there really is no need for yet another way to do fonts in SVG. SVG Fonts are very sophisticated in terms of API, but not very important in terms of uses out there, in Microsoft's eyes.
Microsoft cited the number of image editors and applications that currently have the option to output as SVG as one of the many reasons it decided to back the specification with IE9. The company also showed off how the included Developer Tools let you edit SVG just like editing HTML. That means developers can very easily debug problems with SVG.
"A lot of sites are sniffing for IE and rendering their content as Vector Markup Language (VML)," Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager of IE, explained. "We want them to stop doing that and start rendering as SVG." Development of the VML format ceased in 1998, but it's included in IE5 and higher. Microsoft even released a VML to SVG Migration Guide (880KB) today to help developers. As a result, many websites don't bother to check for the version of IE, and simply tell all versions not to render the SVG, something that will have to change with IE9. For example, Google Maps currently uses VML for vector paths when it detects IE and SVG for all other browsers.
Performance
"Internet Explorer is fundamentally handling the Web in a very different way; the cores of IE8 and IE9 are very different, particularly in the graphics subsystem and JavaScript subsystem," Jason Weber, Principal Program Manager Lead of IE, told Ars. He explained that there was a large amount of optimization work that went into other subsystems but there are really only two that are going to "change the game": compiled JavaScript HTML5 applications and GPU powered HTML5 graphics.JavaScript
According to data compiled by Microsoft, the Platform Preview has somersaulted over Firefox, but is still behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera 10.5. The above test was only performed once: after running it multiple times and taking the average, Microsoft says IE9 had a score of 834 at PDC and has a score of 599 at MIX. "Our internal engineering build score is even higher," Weber told Ars.
Hardware acceleration
To deliver the graphical richness HTML5 allows for, Microsoft believes IE needs to be based off of a very high-performance graphics subsystem (the one found in Windows, of course). Eighteen months ago, Microsoft started the advanced planning for graphics in IE9, Ted Johnson, Partner Program manager of IE, told Ars. The technology builds on Direct2D, the advanced graphics subsystems available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. More specifically, Johnson explained that alpha-channel blending is the main reason IE9 can have the high performance its competitors don't have: the GPU can handle it and deliver consistent frame rates without breaking a sweat. This reduces the load on the CPU. Speaking of which, IE9 takes full advantage of multicore processors (for example, Chakra compiles JavaScript in the background on a separate core of the CPU, parallel to IE9).Johnson also offered an interesting tidbit about battery life. Since the GPU uses fewer watts, he noted that longer battery life can be achieved. Still, he made sure to emphasize that Microsoft was not claiming IE9 would result in longer battery life, but he did say it shows up in certain benchmark tests designed to see how well the browser can handle graphically intensive HTML5 code. The improvement is more noticeable on low-end laptops and netbooks than in gaming laptops with expensive graphic cards.
All this hardware talk brings us to an interesting question: will low-end computers be able to handle all this hardware acceleration that Microsoft keeps boasting about? Microsoft says yes. While the improvements are more noticeable as you move up the hardware tree, even really cheap machines with integrated GPUs are perfectly happy with the way IE9 works. In one example, Microsoft brought out a nettop and showed how well IE9 could play two HD videos in the same webpage using HTML5 and hardware acceleration. Other browsers, meanwhile, failed miserably as the CPU just couldn't keep up.
In another demo, Color Management, Microsoft made sure to show how high it was placing the bar. IE9 supports ICC versions 2 and 4 (IE8 supported neither). By comparison, Firefox supports ICC version 2, Safari supports version 2, and Chrome doesn't support either. The team also says it will have IE9 support TIFF images as well as JPEG-XR (a Microsoft format formerly known as HD Photo).
Beyond the Platform Preview
"Website authors continue to write markup, and the markup in IE9 takes advantage of modern PC hardware through the operating system," Hachamovtich told Ars in summary. Most of the time you spend on your computer is browsing the Web, and browsers today do the same thing regardless of what your PC has inside. With IE9, Microsoft is hoping to make the most out of your PC and finally put that hardware to use, Hachamovitch explained.Today's release is aimed at developers: Microsoft wants them to open their website with it, hit F12 (which opens up Developer Tools), and just play around. It's disappointing, however, that the company is only sharing under-the-hood changes and isn't showing off anything GUI-related. The progress made from IE6 to IE7, and IE7 to IE8 was just as much front-end as it was under-the-hood. We're not really concerned where the refresh button will be placed in IE9, but we do care about what UI features the company is planning to include, not to mention improvements to how tabs work as well as the address bar. Developers must also be briefed on what will be happening to the compatibility button that lets users make IE8 render the page similarly to how IE7 would (Microsoft recently revealed that the compatibility list has been cut down from 3,100 sites to 2,000).
This lack of information about IE9 would be bearable if we had some kind of timeline for the browser, but Microsoft insists it doesn't yet know when it will be ready. IE6 was tied to the release of Windows XP, IE7 was tied to the release of Windows Vista, and IE8 was tied to the release of Windows 7. Will IE9 be tied to the release of Windows 8? Microsoft isn't saying; the company won't even tell us if the browser will be ready this year or in 2011—or even when we might expect a beta.
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