PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

re: PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

Arthur T. Murray — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:38:42 GMT

Jeeze, Louise, with IE9 JavaScript is getting really complicated. I hope that my JavaScript artificial intelligence at www.scn.org/.../AiMind.html will continue to operate within IE9 and all future MSIE releases. I tried to code the AI Mind in Netscape Navigator years ago, but only Microsoft Internet Explorer would let me create the artificial intelligence in the way that I wanted. Now each new MSIE release fills me with trepidation, but so far, so good.

re: PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

Tim Sneath — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:21:12 GMT

Thanks Eric - you're quite right, of course; I meant to say "needn't execute this code _during the page load_". I'll update the article - appreciate your correction.

re: PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

Eric — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:18:11 GMT

The line: "can also use the HTML script defer attribute to manually hint to the scripting engine that it shouldn’t execute a certain block of code." is a bit misleading. It doesn't tell the scripting engine not to execute a certain block of code-- it tells the scripting engine not to block the parser, instead executing the code later. Hence the name "defer".

Also worth mentioning that IE only supports defer and not the new ASYNC attribute.

re: PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

Tim Sneath — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:30:02 GMT

Aaron, would love to see a reproducible test. The purpose of talking about real-world websites is that it's a better comparison than synthetic benchmarks that are easy to optimize for but don't exercise the browser in the same way as a typical site. Nevertheless, the latest public IE build is faster on the JavaScript WebKit SunSpider benchmark than the most recent betas from Firefox and Safari, and is pretty close to the others.

I'm surprised that you're keen that rather than adopting open standards, you want everyone to coalesce around a single browser engine - it's an interesting viewpoint, but I think most people involved in the standards process would say that it would greatly stifle innovation and leave the HTML specification without any purpose other than to document WebKit. Presumably you're asking Mozilla to switch Firefox away from Gecko also?

Do you really feel the web doesn't need competition anymore? It's an unusual viewpoint: I wonder who you would anoint as the 'winner'?

Thank you for sharing your views.

Best wishes,

Tim

re: PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9

Aaron — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:31:16 GMT

(I would have posted this on Gaurav's web site, but he's neglected it severely it looks like).

Real world websites? Arrgh. Not that again. In all my tests, IE is faster than IE8, but not faster than Chrome, Safari, or FireFox. My super real world test is a large Ajax powered web application.

IE9 still is slower than the other major browser beta releases.

Wished that instead of spending time on another version of the IE javascript and rendering engine, Microsoft would have instead focused on creating a better browser based on WebKit. I truly believe that IE has become a fundamental waste of developer and designer time, world wide. The propriatery features that IE brings to the table could have been added to the WebKit engine, and/or a slick shell.

It's really too bad that Microsoft chooses to compete in a space that doesn't really need the competition anymore. Especially given that IE continues to be updated at a glacial pace. :(

Venting over. Need to go back and support and test multiple browsers, which we'll need to do forever. Long live the spirit of Silverlight and Flash (but not Java applets! Yuck!)!