Microsoft's IE9 to Remove Sour Taste of Predecessors
With the beta of Microsoft's next Internet Explorer [IE] due for release in the next 7 days I thought I would take the time to review some of the improvements made to a lethargic yet very popular web browser and how its going to improve the Bespoke Software offering that Bitopia provide.
The Acid Test
In 2008 the Web Standards Project launched the Acid3 test which was designed to measure the rendering ability of web browsers. Generally speaking the higher a web browser scores on the test the more standards it conforms to, and more importantly the better its ability to display web pages correctly. You can run the Acid3 Test on your own web browser to see how it fares.
The Acid3 page runs a series of tests and accumulates the results. In order to pass the test the browser must score 100/100 and render the page exactly as described by Acid3. Whilst Acid3 is a great indicator of how well a browser conforms with web standards, it is not critical that a browser scores 100/100 as parts of the test are based on features that are still experimental. Let's examine some of the results of previous versions of IE.
Web Standards
Internet Explorer has a long standing history of not abiding by web standards. When you visit a site your browser receives information from the web server hosting the web page. Your browser then takes this information and displays it to you as a fully rendered page using a specific set of rules based on the web standards defined by the W3C. In an ideal world, no matter what browser you're using your experience should be the same. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as browsers interpret some of the standards incorrectly, sometimes even ignoring them, which leads to inconsistent results when viewing web pages in different web browsers.
Internet Explorer and the Acid3 Test
Unfortunately, IE has always performed poorly on the Acid3 test. When the test was released in 2008, IE 5, 6 and 7 had already been around for quite some time. However, the results of IE in the test show just how poorly the browser has met standards over the last 10 years.
| Browser | Acid3 Score |
|---|---|
| Internet Explorer 5.5 | 14/100 |
| Internet Explorer 6 | 12/100 |
| Internet Explorer 7 | 12/100 |
| Internet Explorer 8 | 21/100 |
It doesn't take a technology guru to see that these scores are sub-par, but let's put these results into perspective. At the time of IE8's release (which scored 21/100 on the Acid3 test), Firefox 3 (a popular alternative to IE) was also hitting the web. Firefox 3 scored a 68/100 on Acid3, passing over 3 times as many of the tests as IE8. These low scores haven't been a problem in previous years, as web designers and developers merely bend the rules and create "work-arounds" to make their websites look and feel right in Internet Explorer. However, with the emergence of newer, faster web browsers and certain legal difficulties Microsoft are in danger of losing a growing market share if their new offering doesn't hold up to the hype.
Luckily, the development team over at Microsoft have put together something really impressive if the IE9 Platform Previews are anything to go by. Their latest offering is currently scoring a 95/100 on Acid3. That's over 4 times the score of their previous browser.
SunSpider Test and Internet Explorer
The SunSpider test is used for benchmarking JavaScript performance in web browsers. JavaScript is what makes all our web applications work like desktop applications, and allows us to provide clients' with features such as tab-based interfaces and collapsible menus. The better the JavaScript performance the further Bitopia can push the envelope of web applications.
SunSpider runs several tests to determine how well the browser performs. Generally speaking, the quicker the browser completes the test the better its JavaScript performance. The current iteration of Internet Explorer (IE8) provides an average SunSpider completion time of 3.7 secs, whereas IE9's latest build is completing the tests in around 0.3 secs. Although some people claim that modern browsers are built to perform well on tests such as SunSpider but not in real world situations, we're still looking at a browser with much more capability when it comes to JavaScript execution.
Deploying Internet Explorer 9
The major problem with IE9 is that it will not be compatible with Windows XP, which currently accounts for around 61% of the operating system market share. Businesses have been hesitant to move away from Windows XP because of alleged program compatibility issues and the poor offering of Windows Vista. However, now that there is a far better platform available in Windows 7 and program compatibility is far less of an issue, companies are gradually moving away from Windows XP and taking up the modern equivalents (Windows XP is down 11% year on year).
What does this mean for Bitopia?
As a web application developer here at Bitopia we primarily distribute and deploy our bespoke business systems via IE for the simple fact that it is easier to manage browser settings en masse over a network. If we want pages to print a specific way from our web application running on IE we can make a quick change on our client's domain controller and it will roll out to all users across the network. This is a great advantage to us, but recently IE8 has become sluggish as we continue to push the boundaries of web technology and so a refreshed browser is something our development team is most definitely looking forward to.
Powered by JavaScript and ExtJS, our rich application interfaces rely heavily on a powerful browser engine. Here at Bitopia we believe that the gap between a web application and a traditional desktop application should be barely noticeable, but this becomes increasingly difficult when the browser you deploy on is already being pushed to its very limits. IE9 will unlock a plethora of opportunities for the development team here at Bitopia, all without the hindrance of poor performance.
26/01/2012