Posts Tagged ‘IE9’

We have to admit that we completely missed the release of a preview build of Opera 11.50, which will apparently introduce hardware acceleration, and only found this bit because of our eagle-eyed readers (thanks for those continued emails!) It seems to be a very, very early build that simply introduces the hardware acceleration concept and still has a long way to go before we will see a final release.

Has Mozilla gambled Firefox’ future away? Browser market share data released today indicate that Firefox may have suffered a big blow against its market share, while Chrome and especially IE8 were able to gain. Both Net Applications and StatCounter now state that Chrome has reached a milestone and now has more than 50% of the market share of Firefox.

Facebook’s Bruce Rogers posted a chart of JSGameBench browser performance results, which sees Chrome 11 in the lead  in WebGL hardware acceleration, while IE9 falls behind.

I can’t quite remember that we have been so excited about any other bug list ever. Mozilla is getting very creative in keeping the focus on eliminating every single hard- blocking bug from the Firefox 4 code and has, to our knowledge, posted the first-ever bug countdown for a significant public software. Can we ship yet?

Someone should make a soap opera about this, Tim Sneath vs. Paul Rouget, Microsoft vs. Mozilla. A battle of words to figure out whose new browser is the real modern browser. The current chapter: Microsoft steps up for a lecture what a modern browser really should look like. The message: Firefox has just a pretty façade.

Microsoft will be launching the finished new version of IE9 at a press event on March 14. According to a blog post, the company will be hosting a party at SXSW to celebrate the browser.

Firefox 4 Beta 12 will not be released this week and has apparently been moved to next week. Mozilla is now considering the release of yet another Beta, while Google has moved Chrome Beta to version 10 and the developer channel to Chrome 11, which include a huge performance update for the browser’s JavaScript engine.

Perhaps Firefox 4 isn’t quite finalized yet. The most recent meeting minutes suggest that changes in the two most recent betas have caused CPU and memory problems as well as a performance decrease.

It appears that Mozilla has taken the bait from Microsoft and is continuing a browser bitchfest with Microsoft. Paul Rouget, European evangelist for Mozilla, released an infographic that paints IE9 as a browser that is simply catching up with Firefox.

The release of IE9 RC this past week was reason enough for us to have a quick look at the state of the current batch of beta web browsers. We knew that IE9 Beta was fast, but the RC adds a huge punch in hardware accelerated disciplines and distances its rivals far enough to win the overall performance crown. The most recent Beta of Firefox 4 drops in performance, suggesting that Mozilla has more work to do.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s community director, has sharply criticized Microsoft for forcing people to purchase a new OS if they want to use IE9.

Microsoft has polished IE9 Beta enough to justify a release candidate release. It is still a fast and very competitive browser, but there is little doubt that IE9 is not good enough and will have to surrender the market lead. Not tomorrow, but the writing is on the wall.