2008-10-29
Want windows? Use windows
Camino jumped on the “Hey Guys! We could totally make it look like Exposé” bandwagon.
… you know what’d be even more useful? Tabs that work with real Exposé.
All applications get thumbnails, but applications with explicit support for 7 will be able to add thumbnails on a finer-grained basis. IE8, for instance, has a thumbnail per tab (rather than per window).
Me:
As Matt Jones put it: You’re kidding, right? If you want tabs that behave like windows, just use bloody windows.
2008-09-19
JavaScript Engines and the IE Hegemony
Another day, another JavaScript performance increase. This time, it’s the WebKit team, with the somewhat ludicrously named SquirrelFish Extreme, which manages a tenfold speed increase on Safari 3’s JSKit engine, apparently.
Oddly, it seems as if most of the work involved has been done under the auspices of the Summer of Code, Google’s programme to get college students involved in open source projects. Of course, the other newcomer on the JS engine block is their own V8.
However, good as all the competition between these two (and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, due to be released in Firefox 3.1 and, like the others, available in pre-release form) is, it ignores the elephant in the room. As I commented on a PC Pro blog post about Chrome and Firefox (after the V8 talk at Google Developer Day), this progress is pretty much passing IE by.
John Resig’s recent benchmarks of JavaScript engines show that Internet Explorer 7 is awful, and IE8, although better, is nowhere near the performance of the released competing browsers, let alone the improved versions currently under development. Indeed, after one chart he has to note:
No results for IE were provided as the browser crashes when running the tests, unfortunately.
(To be fair, he does go on to say that Safari nightlies also failed on Windows.)
So, what’s the outlook? Clearly JS-intensive applications are here to stay, and I think we’ll increasingly see interfaces to them on the server side and possibly the desktop too. However, the developers of the most cutting-edge of these apps will either be held back by, or have to explicitly exclude, the most common browser in the world. Maybe that’ll be enough to keep Microsoft focussed on improving, and from the notes to a recent interview, it looks like they know it. Here’s hoping it works out.
