lien_meat

February 14, 2011 at 3:14am

IE9 supports a small subset of the proposed html5 features. Too be truthful, no browser supports even close to all the proposed features completely correctly. However, IE9 seems to support a smaller subset than do chrome/safari(same rendering engine basically), ff4(beta), or opera.  IE9 supports about the same subset of html5 that ff3.5 had when it was released a year ago, so yeah, it's way to little to late.  W3C tested ie9 and had good things to say about it, but if you actually take a look at the features of html5 and what it properly supports, it's not as good as some of the others across the entire board, but it does win out on many of W3C's tests features.  Also, chrome has gained 2 whole versions since these tests, and ff4 is now about to be released, so the test figures are no longer even valid.  I'd LOVE to see it tested again.

As far as I can tell, IE9 doesn't support websockets (some say it will, some say it won't, tell me if I'm wrong), half the css3 stuff isn't even close to up to par with the other browsers, and IE will probably ALWAYS have odd differences in their javascript engine that makes it hell to program for, which is half the reason I dislike it, honestly.  I'd love IE to work the same as the other browsers (I'm a web programmer some front end, but mostly server side, it would be my wet dream come true), but I just don't believe it will ever happen.

Also, I'd like to point out that many differences you see (visually) in rendering between browsers is not html compliance, but css and ecmascript(javascript) compliance...something that IE has always been terrible about compared to others, and last I knew IE9 still didn't pass the standard acid3 test either, and claimed it "wasn't their top priority".  I'd just like to say it ought to be, because differences in how javascript and css are interpreted are why devs hate IE so much traditionally.

To sum it up, no browser gets it right completely, but IE has a terrible reputation, and it's gonna take more than just one browser version that works better to make me happy.  They are going to have to keep the trend going. 

lien_meat

February 14, 2011 at 3:12am

IE9's probably pretty decent, but IE in general has a bad track record since ie6 especially, and more accurately, has had a trend for falling way behind in between versions.  IE9 may be awesome (it seems it will be compared to IE8), but by the time IE10 comes around, it will be playing catch up with other browsers again, if history repeats itself again.

ActiveX, as one person pointed out in being an issue, has historically (less frequently nowdays) been the source of many windows exploits, but there still are some occuring because of ActiveX.  One of the most humorous recently is probably this one:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/products_security_advisory09186a0080b25d01.shtml
which is for cisco's secure desktop software...but still, shows how much power activex has...which is just silly to have accesible via the internet in a browser nearly unregulated (on many computers it's on and nobody knows it...)

No really though, activex is nearly useless nowdays, and is traditionally one of IE's biggest security holes, although adobe's reader and flash plugins seem to be stealing the headlines on vulnerabilities these days...

codepath

February 11, 2011 at 7:17am

@resding91: Your restriction to not simply say "it sucks" most likely eliminates their only possible response. They seem to be Microsoft haters and from the wording of their posts, I would say that they have never actually used the IE9 Beta so they probably have no direct experience with it. It's kind of a knee-jerk, hate-first mentality.