Tendo City

Probably so... I test the exclusive beta for Microsoft and let you know!
Check out my review on Saturday.. Stay tuned to this thread..

Every version of IE so far has, no need to change things now! :)

I wait with bated breath.

All the reviews I've read so far put IE9 ahead of the curve. Too bad it doesn't run on XP.

Then again remember the rule:

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IE9 improves over IE8 by basically being a visual clone of Google Chrome. Industry analysts predict that IE9 will achieve functional equality with the current version of Google Chrome by 2013.

It's a visual clone, but that's not the feature every single person in the industry was excited about. It's the hardware acceleration. I still can't believe it's taken so long for browser makers to start making use of it. Firefox and Chrome are both going to be implementing it in their browsers, though in more limited forms at first, which tells me that this development really lit a fire under them.

So IE's a lame ripoff of its competition again, except several generations behind, like always?

Or, to restate it, see my first post in this thread. :)

They were the ones to first do the hardware acceleration. You didn't read my post. They were the big announcers. On that mark, it's the others that are copying them. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's what's needed to move browsers forward, but MS WERE the innovators here. At least give credit where it's due.

> At least give credit where it's due.

Congratulations, Microsoft. 700 monkeys at 700 computers spent 7 years and finally created the first ever original innovative feature for Internet Explorer.

Does it actually do anything, though?

Weltall Wrote:> At least give credit where it's due.

Congratulations, Microsoft. 700 monkeys at 700 computers spent 7 years and finally created the first ever original innovative feature for Internet Explorer.

I think I can agree with that. The big thing is, I don't confuse the current IE team with the old one. The new team really is trying to make a decent browser, and generally hate the legacy that IE6 left behind (mostly, the reams of poorly coded "web apps" used internally in all too many businesses that depend entirely on the non-standard behavior of IE6, which has made all too many businesses decide to not even bother upgrading because the developers for all those custom web apps are gone and most of them are poorly documented, if at all).

A Black Falcon Wrote:Does it actually do anything, though?

If you actually have a GPU, yes. The entire point of the big hardware acceleration fuss is that, for all this time, the CPU and the CPU alone has been processing EVERYTHING you do online. Why does a great modern 2D game render so much faster than an HTML5 page with some decent use of graphical effects? Well, because up until now no browsers were taking advantage of graphics processing to process web graphics. That includes the Flash plugin. As of now, MS has stepped down from "most insecure" company after a massive internal turn-around to focus on it, and Adobe has replaced it. Aside from adobe's flash plugin being the most common attack vector in modern browsers these days, it's choppy animation in even the simplest games can be attributed to a total lack of hardware acceleration. The most recent version adds hardware acceleration to video decompression, but that's the extent of it so far. My point is, HTML5 is poised to replace flash entirely, and one of the big advantages will be that it will run far faster than flash code. IE7 and IE8 were steps in the right direction of modern web standards, but it's IE9 where their efforts are actually on a competing level with the big dogs. As more and more sites take advantage of HTML5 features, I've been forced to make the switch myself. Remember I never bothered adapting to a new browser because for a long time my concern was "I just want web sites to work right". Well, it's long since been past the time when not using IE meant a lot of sites I visited were broken. Chrome and Firefox are interesting. There's some small UI issues that annoy me adapting to them, but there's other things that are nice, however it's mainly due to the fact that IE9 will NOT support XP. Granted, XP is outdated too. I intend on updating to 7 at the first opportunity where it's affordable to me (and adding yet another entry to my expanding boot list of OSes), but by then I may well be used to one or the other of these two competing browsers. I still see Chrome as more or less pointless sometimes though. It doesn't even have a working bookmark menu. For a browser that goes on and on about "saving vertical space to show the page", the virtual requirement of using that most annoying of modern browser fads, the "bookmark bar", is a big complaint to me. I want my bookmarks ONLY when I intend to use one, and then to roll away, not constantly on my screen.

At any rate, the times are a'changin'. I think at some point ABF may even upgrade his screen resolution.

More importantly: will it blend?

Another big thing that hasn't been brought up yet is that IE9 fully supports HTML5 in all its no more need for flash glory..

Sorry if my wall o' text-fu scared away a read attempt, but actually I did bring that up.

Firefox and Chrome apparently support more of the HTML standards right now, and they DID do that first. The IE team has made a point of supporting only the "completed" or "last call phase" HTML5 standards, so that they don't need to back-track or change features down the line. This may seem lazy, but their reasoning, while annoying, is pretty sound. It comes down to the fact that, well, IE is the "lowest common denominator" of web design. Every web developer has to make sure, at the very least, their site runs on IE. The pathetic part is making sure it runs on IE6 (though more and more sites are abandoning support for it, such as Google). With that in mind, the IE team doesn't want to give developers a "moving target" of unpredictable feature support. By only adding web standards that are complete or very unlikely to change before being declared complete, developers can just go ahead and start designing their sites based on standards and completely ignore which browser is being used. Just pick the completed standards and it should be set in stone with no need to update it later when IE has to change some "beta" standard to fit some recent overhaul.

Honestly when it's put like that, it makes sense, though mainly for IE. Other browsers have more freedom to experiment with the unfinalized standards.

Wait, you even have excuses for MS's horrible, "we won't use the standards, we'll use our own things and fight the standards for as long as we can" web browser design? Seriously? That's ridiculous...

Did you read what I said?

I said they actually ARE embracing web standards this time. They just aren't going to put the incomplete and unfinalized standards in the browser. Reading that as anything else is intentional on your part.

That sounds like your excuse for why they're not supporting the standards everyone else is, you know, which is why I replied as I did.

I mean, wouldn't it have been great if Microsoft had actually supported the standards all along, so none of this would be a problem? But no, of course not, they did stupid things like use their own proprietary version of Java, etc.

What they're doing sounds to me like delaying supporting the open standards for as long as possible, presumably so they can push their own standards until the last possible second... because we're Microsoft, we don't support open standards!

The same thing is true with Word, why is Word the only major word processor which cannot open any documents in any competing formats, such as OpenOffice, WordPerfect, etc? Because we're Microsoft and we're number one, you support our format, we'll never even allow our word processor to READ yours. It's utterly ridiculous.

Quote:The same thing is true with Word, why is Word the only major word processor which cannot open any documents in any competing formats, such as OpenOffice,

Not true. I have an .odt file open in Word as I speak. My netbook had OpenOffice, and my main PC has Word. I never had any compatibility issues transferring files back and forth.

I just use Openoffice anyway. I can't come up with any reason to pay THAT much for word processing. I'm with you there.

However, and this is important, MS is going entirely open standards in IE9. Read the reviews. That's their goal. Whatever was the case before, that's gone. They've been slow to catch up, but this time's the big one. They support a vast amount of the current HTML5 standards. The only "legacy" really left is their active x plugin architecture. I wasn't defending IE6, I was explaining the fact that the only standards they are including are the finalized ones. Nothing you said discounts the fact that building for standards that could fluctuate or be replaced altogether at any time is a recipe for a potentially "broken" web. It would be no different than the odd design needs of IE6.

Weltall Wrote:Not true. I have an .odt file open in Word as I speak. My netbook had OpenOffice, and my main PC has Word. I never had any compatibility issues transferring files back and forth.

Wow, you're right, they finally added that in Word 2007, it'd never been there before... I hadn't noticed because Word 2007 is such a horribly designed program that I've never been able to stand to use it. It seems worse than OpenOffice compatibility, it got the font completely wrong in the one WordPerfect document I just opened for example (OpenOffice regularly messes up spacing and things like that, but not usually fonts or size, like Word seems to like to do when converting files to its format).

OpenOffice is definitely better than Word, I used it for a while, until I could get a copy of Wordperfect to install on this computer. I've been using Wordperfect for a long time though and know it best, so it's always been my favorite word processor by far, and I've never liked Word. But Word just seems to be getting worse, 2007 is such a bizarrely laid out program... it's nice they finally put in some other format compatibility, but it's so weird apart from that that I don't want to use it if at all possible.

A Black Falcon Wrote:Wow, you're right, they finally added that in Word 2007, it'd never been there before... I hadn't noticed because Word 2007 is such a horribly designed program that I've never been able to stand to use it. It seems worse than OpenOffice compatibility, it got the font completely wrong in the one WordPerfect document I just opened for example (OpenOffice regularly messes up spacing and things like that, but not usually fonts or size, like Word seems to like to do when converting files to its format).

OpenOffice is definitely better than Word, I used it for a while, until I could get a copy of Wordperfect to install on this computer. I've been using Wordperfect for a long time though and know it best, so it's always been my favorite word processor by far, and I've never liked Word. But Word just seems to be getting worse, 2007 is such a bizarrely laid out program... it's nice they finally put in some other format compatibility, but it's so weird apart from that that I don't want to use it if at all possible.

Word Perfect!!?!??! Son, did you just emerge from the 80's? That program started with windows 3.1.. And died a horrible death about 5 years ago..

Hahaha etoven doesn't know who he's talking to

etoven Wrote:Word Perfect!!?!??! Son, did you just emerge from the 80's? That program started with windows 3.1.. And died a horrible death about 5 years ago..

Huh? Windows 3.1? Actually, WordPerfect was at its most popular in DOS, not Windows... Wordperfect 5.1 was the best word processor of its day, and was the best DOS word processor ever. The Windows versions are just as good or better, MS just crushed it with their marketing machine I think. The first version we owned was WP5.1 for DOS. And while Word (always a far, far worse program) won, unfortunately, WP is still a fine word processor still being made. The newest version I have is just Wordperfect 12, which is from 2004, but there are newer versions, of course, and it would be nice to upgrade, WP12 doesn't have OpenOffice file support, and I'd like it if I could open OO files in WP, because I do have some OpenOffice files. I mean, sure I could save them as Word documents in OO and then open those Word (97-03 or whatever .doc) documents in WP and do it that way, but just being able to directly open the files would be better.

I used WP5 for DOS, 6.something for Windows, 10, 12... WP 6 for Windows 3.1 is a better word processor than any version of Word I've ever used. That was just an amazing word processor, I used it for years and years as my main word processor. I then used Word for maybe a year, because its lack of long filename support was getting annoying, but then I got WP10, and all was better again. WP 10 and 12 are pretty similar really, but both are fantastic. X5, from what I can see, looks like it's what WP always is, an incremental improvement built on the base of what Windows Wordperfect has always been, which is exactly what people like me who know it so well would want.

But no, to correct you, WP is still very much current. I may not have the newest version, WP X5, which just released this year, but I'd like to. It's even got PDF editing, that would be pretty cool to have, and as I said the version I'm using, 12, is getting a little old. It'd be nice to upgrade. :)

WordPerfect is such a great program, I think that if more people actually tried it they'd see how good it is. Word's only successful because everyone uses it, not because it's actually good.

As for popularity, I think that WP's popularity has been pretty much the same for the better part of fifteen years now -- it has its market, but Microsoft has the majority. I'm sure OpenOffice has hurt them a little too, but the same for Microsoft, and I'd bet that WP's popularity is pretty much about what it's been for a long time now. I've seen nothing to suggest anything different. Corel's not as big a company as they used to be, but it seems to be doing fine now.

What's wrong with Microsoft Word, anyway? It can be a little slow at times (but my computer is heinously outdated), and it's not that intelligent when you tell it to ignore a sentence that it thinks is grammatically incorrect (I was going for style, OKAY Word? This isn't a term paper, it's fucking erotica), and I don't like how in 2007 everything got shifted around. Aside from that, though, it's a word processor. I don't use most of its features, I just need it for something simple but slightly more sophisticated than Notepad.

Oh yeah, and Wordperfect has been using the exact same file format ever since the program moved to Windows in the mid '90s -- WP 12 .wpd documents are fully compatible with WP6, and vice versa. No file format switching like Microsoft's doing. Wordperfect .wpd files are much smaller than Word '97-03 files with the exact same contents, and are comparable in size to OpenOffice files, which are also much smaller than those bloated Word .doc files. I'm not sure about .docx from Word 2007 and beyond, as I hate Word 2007 more than any version of Word before, I really haven't dealt with them much.

Oh yes, and once you have learned to use Reveal Codes, you'll never want to go back to a word processor without it...

Also, WP isn't free, or cheap really, but it's also much, much cheaper than Word.

I use Word 2007. I have no issues with it.

I mean, all I do with it is write prose, so if the devil is in the details, it means absolutely nothing to me.

Well first, I've been using Wordperfect versions for Windows for a long time, so one thing I like about it is that I know WP well. I know where the menu options I use are, I know how the menus are all arranged, etc. Word arranges things very differently; it always did, but even more so now that 07 and beyond have that bizarre tabbed layout. WP's layout makes much more sense to me, everything is where it should be. This is, I'll admit, one of my top reasons for liking WP more. A lot of things aren't where I expect them to be in Word, it's all strangely laid out. And WP has a visual look somewhat unlike OpenOffice or Word; even aside from the menu bar on top, the presentation of the page looks a little different. OO puts the part of the page you can write in in a grey box of sorts. WP uses less obtrusive dashed lines. Both look better than that odd blue backdrop of Word 2007, though, and unlike Word 2007 both have rulers marking distance on the page, to let you easily alter the margins.

Some actual things though:

-Misspelled words are underlined by default, but the grammar checker is much less intrusive than Word; for the most part you don't even notice it unless you do a specific grammar search. There's a thesaurus too of course.

-WP has always been easier to insert images, tables, presentations, etc. into than Word. Text and graphic formatting is easy, unlike Word. Text formatting is easy too - columns are simple to put in and end, etc. I know that Corel only bought Wordperfect in the mid '90s or so, but I do wonder whether part of the reason for this is that Corel also has a drawing program, CorelDraw...

-Wordperfect doesn't open each document in a different window. Instead, all documents you currently have open open inside the one Wordperfect window, and you can switch between them within the program. This was a HUGE difference in Win 3.1, and in 95 and on back before Vista (or was it XP?) added the 'combined tabs' thing that merges all open windows of the same program into menus on the taskbar, but it's still a difference. WP's design here uses less system resources, works better, looks better, is better designed, and is just all around superior.

-Corel hasn't followed MS's lead with that atrocious new menu system Word 2007 uses, WP X5 has a traditional interface. Good, Microsoft's is just terrible, what in the world are they thinking... WP, in contrast, has a consistent look. They update things in each version, but never do radical changes that confuse you and force you to relearn the program, as MS has done.

-Reveal Codes is, as I said, an awesome feature. Reveal Codes is an option you can enable which opens a window on the bottom of the screen that shows the "code" of the document -- that is, it shows exactly where every formatting mark is, so you can know precisely what will happen when you delete any one. With other word processors, getting your formatting right can be a real pain; with WP this is sometimes true as well, but Reveal Codes makes things make much more sense, because you can see exactly what's going on behind the scenes.

-X5 has PDF editing in it (you can save and edit PDFs). Word doesn't have that. It's also got web service integration for auto-updating data.

-Full support for all the major document formats, without Word's issues.

And other things I'm not thinking of, I'm sure.


Overall though, I agree -- any of the major word processors works. If you're just writing basic papers and stuff, any of them will be fine. Still, it's worth trying the major ones, I think, to see which one you like the most.

So I opened up IE9 to examine it for this review. And then I was quickly distracted by a YouTube video.. Damn internet.. :)

After watching Stephin Colbert being insulted in congress simply because he is the only real American left.. I decided to get back to the review.

So, IE9....

What can I say? I decided to break this review down to three categories.. Speed, stability and HTML5 compliance which Microsoft clams are the three main tenets of IE9 .

Speed:
Well the only test on the web I could find that rated IE9 as fast was published by Microsoft... Fancy that... The truth of the matter is.. IE9 is slow as hell, even with GPU acceleration. In my opinion chrome and other web-kit browsers are still king and always will be.. So In the speed category IE9 gets a D rating.


Stability:
Let me put it this way.. I started to write this review in IE9, and it become so unstable that I had to quickly cut and paste my post into chrome.. Also, there is no cut and past option in the right click menu, which pissed me off even more. Fortunatly, must windows UI text boxes inherent the CTRL+Delete hotkey from the windows FORMS library, and IE9 was no exception.. And, additionally there is no in-form spell check, unless you want to install IE spell, which dosn't even underline words in real time! Also, if you want to upgrade to IE9 final release, you best be prepared to install Windows7 Service Pack 1 first, because you can't install IE9 with out it. So, you can add the risk of installing a unstable service pack to the risk of installing a crappy browser, But wait theirs more!! Windows 7 SP1, has not even been given a release date yet, so I guess IE9 final release is on hold for awhile as well. So for stability sake, IE9 gets a stinky F.


HTML5 Complience:
Ha ha... Again the only site that clams IE9 is fully HTML5 compliant is owned by Microsoft.. Every other test I ran on the browser by independent testing sites put IE9 in dead last for standards compliance. And not surprising Google chrome beta won that prize. Microsoft's clams the IE9 will follow the w3c standards to a tee in my opinion is hogwash. If Microsoft really wanted to impress me, they will abandon all the ActiveX horse shit, I mean really it's not like anyone uses it so why keep it around? Except for the sake of spreading mal-ware.. So for the sake of compliance again IE9 gets a big fat F that smells like the inside of my ass.

Total Score: DFF for a F Average that smells like donkey penis roasting over hot coals.

Search harder. There's been extensive testing of IE9 lately and it's been blazing fast in a number of things. As for HTML5, try the web standards group for an example of how it's stacking up.

http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

http://gumballtech.com/2010/09/15/ie9-vs...peed-test/

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/25/html5...n-windows/

Seriously, there's plenty of places you can check if you're willing to accept that this latest offering is a complete rewrite and not just assume it's some marginal bug fix of IE6 like so many people seem to.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:Search harder. There's been extensive testing of IE9 lately and it's been blazing fast in a number of things. As for HTML5, try the web standards group for an example of how it's stacking up.

http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

http://gumballtech.com/2010/09/15/ie9-vs...peed-test/

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/25/html5...n-windows/

Seriously, there's plenty of places you can check if you're willing to accept that this latest offering is a complete rewrite and not just assume it's some marginal bug fix of IE6 like so many people seem to.

You forget DJ.. My review is not based on some biased test.. I actually have the software installed.. And I speak from personal experience when I say, it is as slow and crappy as ever.

But don't you see? Personal experience IS biased. These tests try to eliminate that.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:But don't you see? Personal experience IS biased. These tests try to eliminate that.

But these test gave 3 different results making them completely biased.. None of which put IE9 at the top position I might add. The first 2 links you provided put chrome at the top of the list.. With IE9 in second place. And then the last link took me to a site that seemed to favor Firefox with chrome in last place.