IE releases are still tied to the years long windows ship cycle, which is a significant disadvantage when all your competitors are on months long cycles. Saddled with such a huge OODA disadvantage as well as all the strategy-tax BS from MS is there any hope?
By the time IE9 is actually out Chrome may well have hardware accelerated everything, an LLVM client/plugin model, javascript that runs faster than Java, and client-side Erlang support (or who knows what), with Firefox not far behind. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
I'm pretty sure I get notifications for Windows Updates when there's a new version of IE. And even if not, I've somehow gotten IE 7 or 8 on an XP install, so it's no different than when Mozilla or Google announce a new release. If you want it, you get it.
The people who want it are irrelevant. So are the people who don't want it. Both are minorities compared to the people who don't care, and just pick the default option. Chrome's default is to silently upgrade, and light a tiny orange dot when you need to restart.
Are you saying that IE 9 won't ship until Windows 8 ships? Because what I'v read shows IE 9 shipping in 2011 and Windows 8 in 2012.
In European versions of Windows, you now get a choice between which web browser to use. That's about as fair as it's going to get.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#His...
You mean: "has been dropping steadily".
> IE9 is going to be one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships.
I've heard that about '95, '98, 2000, XP, Vista and windows 7 as well as a whole bunch of products. They can't all be 'one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships'.
> It will be compatible enough with web standards, and offer enough performance, that it should allow developers to build more sophisticated apps based on open standards. Html5, css3 and fast Javascript will soon be a given.
They already are, just not in the IE world. That's the reason for line one above, Microsoft has been playing catch-up.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/09/Benefits-of-GPU-...
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/vega
The interesting parts of the article are the implementation details about the sandbox.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html
Unity3D is at a turning point.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-f...
That's what makes it exciting. Hardware acceleration for rendering the front page of HN: not so exciting. Hardware acceleration for 3D APIs drawing stuff in a canvas tag: very exciting.
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...
I guess this is more important for advanced features like canvas than regular browsing.
