Smarter Geek

Disclaimer: I have only seem this behaviour on one computer so far but I am testing it one more really soon.

I have just install IE9 on a Windows 7 computer running Service Pack 1 and I was very pleased to see that it does not required a reboot to install. Previously I have installed IE9 on 3 Windows 7 computers that are not running service pack 1 and they all required a reboot. Now it seems that with Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installed it is now possible to install IE9 without a reboot.

This is a huge deal as it means that it is likely that updates to the browser will be able to be installed without having to require a reboot of the OS. Now this may be a nice have for end users however this is a much bigger deal for Windows Servers as IT administrators as they can now patch what is the most vulnerable part of the server OS (the browser) without any down time. This should hopefully mean that IT administrators will not need to revert to installed “Server Core” versions of the server OS’s just to ensure that they don’t have to reboot them every patch Tuesday to keep them secure.

In my previous post “Microsoft shows off IE9 hardware acceleration still trumps Chrome 7 performance” I showed you a video of the performance difference of IE9 to Chrome 7 with hardware acceleration turned on. Now Microsoft’s IE Blog has published an article explaining how implement “Full Hardware Acceleration” unlike the other browser makers.

“Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. “

Needless to say I am very excited to see what other surprise’s Microsoft may have when they reveal the beta version of IE9 on September 15th.

Source The Architecture of Full Hardware Acceleration of All Web Page Content – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

During one of the final session of TechEd New Zealand 2010 Nigel Parker from Microsoft compared the performance difference of the latest build of IE9 to Chrome. This demonstration shows that the hardware acceleration in IE9 is still much faster than Chrome even when hardware acceleration was enabled in the latest Chrome Canary build.

For some time Mozilla and Google would tout that performance of their browsers JavaScript engines as compared to IE but now that the performance difference is almost negligible Microsoft has taken a huge lead in what the next big performance benchmark for browsers, HTML performance.

Microsoft have just released a Internet Explorer 9 developer edition at MIX 10 in Las Vagas this week. This version of IE9 has been released to great praise however this version has a very limited UI. This is a move by Microsoft so that developers can start to testing their web sites but not to be usefull enought people dont start to do this as their default browser as its still not even beta code. However there is something a little more usable by customising the home page to something other than http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive .

Step 1. Right click on the Internet Explorer 9 icon on your desktop and click on “properties”

Step 2. Add the URL you want to set as your home page on the far right of the path in the “Target:” text field then click “OK”.

Now when you click on the IE9 shorcut on your desktop you will go to the URL you typed in above and all you have to do to go back to the home page is press “F10”.

Microsoft have just release a version of Internet Explorer 9 that you can download and run to test agianst your own sites. Unlike previous developer/technical preview version of Internet Explorer you can now run it as a standalone applications whitout it completley replaceing Internet Explorer 8.

It also seems they are going to be releasing new versions of the browser in fairly quick sucession (at least quick for Microsoft) as they say on thier web site:

“We hope to release a new version of Internet Explorer Platform Preview approximately every 8 weeks”

This might be an indication that the Microsof could be changing the update model of Internet Explorer so that they can release updated version on a more frequent schedule than even the monthly secuirty updates. While this would allow Microsoft to release new features on a regular basis it would also mean they could push out browser security updates out far more agressivly like Chrome and Firefox.

Downlaod and Install the Preview from www.IETestDrive.com

Right now the Acid 3 is only at 55/100 (IE8 was 32/100) however as Microsoft will point out that ACID is not an official test for HTML 5 compatability and is more a indication. Microsoft are obvioulsy going to work on this further and it is likley that they will improve this score over time.

Long Zheng has also tweeted that it has also looks like that Microsoft have thrown its weight behind the H.264/HTML5 video camp rather than the OGG/HTML5 video codec.