Microsoft claims massive speed boost in latest IE 11 build (30 percent faster than the competition)

CNET ^ | 09/18/2013 | Seth Rosenblatt

[SeekAndFind]

The new Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 Release Preview is 30 percent faster than the competition, says Microsoft. But more importantly, Web browsing is once again a big deal in Redmond.

Buoyed by the good news of market share growth in August for Internet Explorer, Microsoft is touting major improvements in the new Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 Release Preview on Wednesday.

The virtual machine version of the IE 11 Release Preview will be available at modern.ie later this week.

The IE 11 Release Preview, equivalent to the "release candidate" stage of the traditional software development cycle, is the last pre-release version of IE 11 before it becomes available to all Windows 7 owners. Roger Capriotti, IE's marketing director, would only say that the final version would be ready later this fall.

[Gaffer]

So....I’m guessing that they can obtain this MASSIVE speed boost by not taking the time to snoop all through your computer shit before they load or change pages? Tell me...which is it?

[Sparticus]

The speed improvement is ostensibly due to improvements in IE’s JavaScript engine.

[Cicero]

I think IE10 was a big improvement over the predecessors, for speed and stability. But over the years I’ve learned to avoid beta versions of Windows or IE, since they are too basic to mess with. So, I guess I’ll wait for the release version.

Only point that bothers me a bit is that it will be set to work with touch screen. I don’t use touch screen, and I’d prefer not to complicate things with stuff I don’t use. And the touch screen nonsense with Windows 8 has been a disaster for laptop and desktop users.

Well, it says it’s speedier. We’ll see.

[Gaffer]

Yeah...that’s what I’d say to, I guess.

[GeronL]

One browser or OS for everything is a dumb idea.

[qam1]

Let’s see

A) Firefox can’t size webpages right, causing much sideways scrolling

B) Opera removed it’s dropdown menu bar so now you always have to manual type in web page addresses

C) IE, Constantly freezes (while it’s spying on you?) and won’t stop nagging you about managing add-ons

D) Chrome is Google and they are evil

Why after 15-20 years has browsing the Internet become such a hassle?

I am tempted to pull out an old AOL CD and use their browser.

[GeronL]

I have no problem with Firefox (which just updated minutes ago with a new version, apparently)

[GeronL]

My first browser was Netscape 1.22

lol.

I bet it would be blazing fast although it probably wouldn’t support a lot of the stuff on the web these days

[GeronL]

Wiki even has a screenshot

Well that brings back the memories. lol.

[GraceG]

Did they create an IE 11 skin for Firefox?

I say Sarcastically...

[OneWingedShark]

Let’s see:
A) Firefox can’t size webpages right, causing much sideways scrolling
B) Opera removed it’s dropdown menu bar so now you always have to manual type in web page addresses
C) IE, Constantly freezes (while it’s spying on you?) and won’t stop nagging you about managing add-ons
D) Chrome is Google and they are evil

Why after 15-20 years has browsing the Internet become such a hassle?

What you're seeing, IMO, is a symptom of one of the biggest problems in the industry — there has been a lot of emphasis on "coding" rather than "programming", by which I distinguish the latter by a certain passion for correctness (to include design). This is evidenced in part by which languages are popular/mainstream: C, C++ Java, PHP [most especially PHP], and C#. These languages are (a) more grown than designed, or be (b) use as a basis a language of type a, which can generally be considered damaging to the design.

A counter-example to the above would be Ada (or perhaps Eiffel) which is very concerned with correctness — the idea of a subtype is so ingrained to the language that not using it would mark you as someone new to the language and/or trying to directly translate inferior (less expressive) language mechanically. For an example of how this helps correctness consider the following lines:
-- These subtypes are language defined.
subtype Natural is Integer range 0..Integer'Last;
subtype Positive is Natural range Natural'Succ(Natural'First)..Natural'Last; -- Same as range 1..Integer'Last;

-- The following cannot cause a Divide by Zero exception.
Function Divide ( Numerator: Integer; Denominator: Positive) return Float;


type Window is private; -- The type's implementation is not visible to 'clients' using it.
type Window_Access is Access Window; -- This defines a "pointer" to a Window.
subtype Handle is Not Null Window_Access;

Function Maximize( Window : Handle ) return Boolean; -- This function's body cannot be executed if the parameter is NULL.
-- Also, note that the above means that a developer/implementer is not burdened with remembering to check for NULL in the body.

As you can see, the language itself makes correctness very easy, generally unlike C-style languages. What is interesting is that there seems to be a little bit of the industry "waking up" to the flaws here: C# has made several strides to correct (and/or disallow) troubling syntactic constructs inherited from C, Java eliminated the reliance upon the preprocessor (and [meta-]template programming of C++), and the new revision of C++ seems to make some big strides toward where Ada's 1983 revision was with respect to concurrency [though the library-level parallelism cannot ever be better than a language-level concurrency construct].

If you're interested a couple of academics recently used Ada (and the SPARK Ada-subset/proving-tool) to make a provably secure/correct DNS server: Ironsides.

[OneWingedShark]

I have no problem with Firefox (which just updated minutes ago with a new version, apparently)

The only problem I have with it [usability-wise] is the memory-leaks.

[hosepipe]

This is a drama good to watch on Firefox....

[Utilizer]

? I have utilized at least three different OS's live disks over the last several days, not including 'doze xp, me, 2k, and se, and both firefox and opera seem to work quite well on them (Mepis 11, uberstudent lxde, and exegnulinux).

I see no problems with pagesizing in FireFox, and while Opera does not have a topbar menu by default you can initial it by selecting the option in the preferences section.

IE is never used here for several reasons, not the least of which being the security exploit recently discovered -yes, I know; "which one?". MS is CONSTANTLY producing exploits, or 'features' as some programmers are forced to call them.

Google sold out to the ChiComs. Do not trust anything from them at all.

Of course, I dunno if you are using a mac...

[DAC21]

OK, but will the back button work 100% of the time like it now doesn’t?

[FreeAtlanta]

I got you guys beat....

[Utilizer]

I think in FireFox you have to hit [Alt] [leftarrow] for that to work. The [Backspace] key never worked in it that I know of, with the caveat that I only began using it back in 2007 or so...

[Vendome]

Sheah right.

And monkeys will fly out of my azz.

[Vendome]

Again?!!

Seems like they update every two weeks.