marypcbuk

I don't often get to write one of those stories that gets picked up everywhere because I don't often break news, but sometimes it happens and this is one of them: at Teched, Joe Marini of the IE on Windows Phone team told me IE9 for WP7 is code complete and I covered the details for TechRadar: It's faster and it's almost finished - but it still won't have Flash. I've been under the weather with a cold and back problems (I coughed so hard I put my back out; it's almost funny except it hurts) and Maker Faire meetings, so it was a surprise when @sbisson mentioned that my story was getting referenced on lots of sites. Scoop! ;-)

Several of them use it as evidence to speculate that whatever gets announced at the Mango press conference tomorrow, it won't be shipping finished code. I completely agree; not only did Marini tell me they're working on debug and performance. but in an interview I did with Paul Bryan about the business features in Mango that will be on ZDNet UK soon he mentioned that both the Lync features and the UI for conversation view were still under development last week. The Windows Phone team code fast - but not that fast. My opinion? Mango is feature locked and we'll get details of everything in it, dates for the rollout of updates to operators and a beta SDK for dvelopers with an emulator that gets updated once the code is more finished.

Hands on IE9 RC: feature complete with WebM and geolocation - and some by-demand interface tweaks http://techradar.com/927657

Interview: How IE9 uses app reputation to axe malware when half all downloads are brand new every day http://t.co/Abf6NnF

Time, and trends. Not the HTML 5 video trend, but deep architectural changes in browsers that mean we're going to move away from the current extensibility models... Read more about the intriguing picture of the future that Microsoft's Andy Lees painted for me

Well, all the Windows Phone 7 '7 things' features are flying about this week..

If you’ve always used Internet Explorer simply because you've always liked its Web slices and accelerators, or have been fond of the fact that it was the first browser to run in protected mode for security, or because in IE your online banking site reliably works; whether you’ve stuck with it from inertia, or because you need it for a work site – whether you love or tolerate IE today, we think you’re going to love IE 9 beta. Here's my nine reasons

Why did Steve Jobs use the passive to talk about the patent threat to Ogg and what does that ahve to do with HTML 5 and Flash?

Anyone who's worked on any title with me knows that I exchew the passive voice; the passive voice is to be avoided. Over on our ZD blog I enjoy dissecting an superb example of why it's not as clear as the active voice and when that can be an advantage.

IE is never going to use WebKit; get over it. You don't want it to; the fewer browser rendering engines there are, the less innovation we'll see in browsers. (When there were 13+ browsers in the mid 90s there was more development going on than there was when we only had IE and Netscape). What we want is a version of the IE Trident rendering engine that does more, better, faster, more compatibly.

At first I was disappointed by the IE9 preview; I'd wanted a beta I could use as my main browser. After talking through with the IE team what they're doing in IE9 and why, I'm seeing a minimalist wrapper around the Trident engine as a good way of getting to a version of IE that can deliver all of that. Look under the hood and you can see how much the IE team wants to do and how far they've got so far. Here's my tour of the things in IE9 you'll care about, as far as the page engine goes.

Let me have more than 8 of them, for a start. But there needs to be some kind of special case when the browser is being started by something else, like the handy prompt in Windows 7 that the hotspot you're connecting to is going to need more than just a smile to let you get connected, which says 'click here to enter more details'. In that case, I probably don't want all 8 tabs, because they'll all have the logon page rather than my page. And if the logon page plays a video, I'm going to have 8 videos starting a fraction of a second apart and giving the most interesting sonic effect of the nice lady being cloned while she's talking to me... aaaaargh!

I covered the IE 9 announcements over at TechRadar...

Microsoft showed Internet Explorer 9 for the first time yesterday at its Professional Developer Conference, but a technical preview won't be available before next year (perhaps at CES 2010 in January). Instead, Windows Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky demonstrated the latest test version, with the Trident rendering engine running on DirectX instead of GDI - to show that IE development is still going on, and making progress on performance and support for standards. read the rest

We've been talking to the IE team a few times this week, and keeping an eye on the comments and thinking about the reception IE gets. I'm not sure why I feel the need to apologise for using IE 8 because I like it and it works well for me; perhaps because it marks me as 'not cool' to use and like IE. It's not my favourite browser - that's Skyfire on Windows Mobile, which is gecko underneath, but running on a server in the cloud, which should preserve my geek credentials... So much of the discussion about browsers generates more heat than light. So much of the reaction against IE seems to be Mac/Windows mud-slinging, general 'Microsoft the Evil Empire mud-slinging' or a conflation of every version of Internet Explorer that's ever sucked with the current version. What do we need apart from a civil debate based on the actual merits? A better test and better ways of deciding what should be in the tests.

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Entries tagged with browser

#IE9 on #WP7 is code complete, but is Mango done?

More IE 9 coverage

Why Flash isn't in Windows Phone 7

9 reasons you want IE 9

On ZDNet: Video codecs, IP and the passive aggressive voice

IE 9 in pictures: what you get and why Microsoft put it in

Cacophony! What should IE do about startup tabs?

IE 9: faster and smoother - and always criticised

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March 2022

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