November, 2010

Performance on the web is multi-dimensional. Real websites call on many different browser subsystems to deliver amazing experiences. Each browser subsystem in turn has its own performance characteristics. The chart here and the diagrams in this post describe the specific subsystems like JavaScript and graphics rendering and more in detail. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been tuning the JavaScript engine for more of the patterns we’ve found in real world sites. Based on the progress...

Internet Explorer 9 introduces sub-pixel ClearType® font positioning as part of its hardware-accelerated rendering of HTML5 content. With IE9 now in beta, we’re getting a lot of feedback and questions about this feature. The bulk of this post describes issues Web developers should be aware of. But first, since all Windows users can benefit by tuning ClearType for their display, let’s start there. Tuning ClearType For best results, you should tune ClearType for your particular...

Today we released a recommended update for all Internet Explorer 9 Beta customers via Windows Update ( KB2448827 ). This update includes stability fixes for the beta build. It is not a new Internet Explorer 9 Beta build. Another update shipped today ( KB2452648 ) resolves issues between the IE9 send feedback feature on 64-bit machines with Windows-Live-Essentials 11. These updates apply only to Internet Explorer 9 Beta. Customers who have automatic updating enabled will not need to take any action...

Typically the job of a web browser is to download and display content-- establishing a network connection, sending HTTP requests, retrieving the web page, and downloading and running all of its content. These operations pose non-trivial challenges, and as such, web-browsers are among the most complicated software that most of us routinely use. However, there’s a whole separate (higher level!) challenge around selectively not running (filtering) content. Today, different browsers offer many...

IE9 is the first version of Internet Explorer to natively support XHTML. For those not familiar, XHTML is the XML serialization of HTML. Among other benefits, XHTML can help maintain cleaner markup due to its fail-fast nature in the face of parsing errors. You can see IE9 running XHTML for yourself by visiting examples on the Internet Explorer Test Drive site like SVG Helicopter , IE Beatz , and SVG-oids . In this post I’ll share a few details about XHTML and IE9's support for it. What version of...

The Windows Summit is a website designed for people who want to build solutions with Internet Explorer 9 or who engineer and test Windows 7 PCs, devices, and software. We just posted new IE9 sessions that highlight the latest web platform capabilities in IE9. The eight presentation s cover many aspects of building solutions in HTML5 using same markup and the rich features in IE9 to bring sites into Windows. In addition to the video recording, each session includes a PowerPoint deck and code samples...

Last year I wrote about the W3C’s annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) conference. This is where most of the W3C working groups get together for a week of face to face meetings and networking. TPAC 2010 was a couple of weeks ago and here I will highlight some of the topics discussed by the groups where we participate. The W3C has a long history as the venue for agreeing on web standards and continues to be the place where the most important web standards are developed....

The Sixth Platform Preview of IE9 includes support for CSS3 2D Transforms . Similar to the use of “ms” in the Web Timing APIs , the 2D Transforms properties begin with –ms: -ms-transform and –ms-transform-origin. This post explains the purpose of vendor prefixes, how we decide when to use vendor prefixes, and how we recommend developers treat these properties. The purpose of vendor prefixes Vendor prefixes are a mechanism that several browsers have used for handling timing conflicts between implementations...

Since we released IE9 Beta we’ve received lots of great feedback on the Add-on Performance Advisor . It’s encouraging to see how users are able to stay in control of their browsing performance in IE9. Ultimately, we want to enable users to use more of their add-ons without negatively impacting performance. To that end, we dedicated many of our recent posts to providing guidance to add-on developers on how to measure and improve add-on performance. Our internal partners have focused on making performance...

Today we feature a post by Nishant Kothary & Joshua Allen, web standards evangelists at MIX Online who work closely with the web community to listen, learn and help them make the most of the Microsoft platform. The recurring theme for IE9 is about putting sites in the center—from enabling hardware-accelerated HTML5, to the simplified browser UI building on the familiar experiences of Windows and the power of whole PC. In fact, the public launch of the IE9 beta on beautyoftheweb.com centered on...

At Velocity , we showed Internet Explorer 9 as the first browser to support the W3C Navigation Timing proposal to provide performance information to developers at runtime. This interface is aimed at helping developers measure and understand the performance of their website . Web developers can use this performance information to make their web sites faster. For IE9 Platform Preview 6, we updated the Navigation Timing interface to reflect the latest work of the Web Performance Working Group. Special...