Blog
IE9 First Impressions: Not As Awful
Over the weekend I played with the IE9 beta on a Windows 2008 server I temporarily setup in Rackspace Cloud. It's not that awful — or at least not as awful as previous versions. It lacks some basic things like native spell check and intuitive tabs. For example, the tabs and address bar reside on the same horizontal line and fight each other for space. You can make the address bar larger (and the tabs smaller) or the opposite, but you cannot place them on separate lines.
Acid3 IE9 scores an impressive 95/100 on the Acid3 test. By contrast, my personal favorite Safari 5 scores 97/100. (In fact, WebKit nightlies have scored 100/100 for two years...) This is good progress, but a bit overdue. Reasonable people expected this in IE8.
HTML5 IE9 scores a disappointing 21/300 at html5test.com. Safari 5 scores 208/300 on the same test... yes, 10x better than IE9. Somehow IE9 actually scores higher in compatibility mode (27/300)! The HTML5 features supported are <canvas>, local storage, session storage, cross-document messaging and SVG.
This is a good start. Let's hope HTML5 is where the IE team focuses the remaining energy before the final release. At this rate, however, web developers may have to wait for IE 10 before they can stop drinking the Microsoft haterade.
Spring MVC Talk at NHJUG!
I gave a talk on Spring MVC at the New Hampshire Java Users Group last night -- check it out!
Also, check out NHJUG while you're at it -- I'm a co-founder!
