IE9 now the most used ‘modern’ browser in the world
Posted Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 8:31 pm by Jason Cartwright
Browser wars are always a contentious issue, with the choice of which to use being almost as personal as which phone you choose to carry. Despite which Browser you choose to set as your default, there is a new king. Internet Explorer 9 is now the most used ‘modern’ browser worldwide.
The term modern browser is used to qualify IE9’s lead, because the reality is IE8 actually has more users. By stipulating ‘modern browser’ Microsoft compares IE9 numbers against All versions of Firefox and all versions of Chrome. The other key constraint in this data set is that it only looks at Windows 7. As we know Windows XP still makes up a decent slab of the desktop market, an OS that does not support IE9.
When talking about trends, we really are searching for indicators for the future, so the concentration on Windows 7 is actually the statistic that matters, but its important to understand the difference.
In a blog post on Microsoft’s Windows Team Blog, references data from Net Applications from the month of November. An important note is that while IE8 and IE9 both enjoy a larger share than competitors, IE’s overall usage actually gained in October. Despite spending most of the year dropping from 58.35% usage to around 52% desktop browser share, they jumped from 52.63% in Oct to 52.64%.
Source: Net Applications, November 2011 (monthly data).
The reality of ‘modern’ browsers is that they all perform well and support new HTML5 + CSS3 standards. Functionality-wise our browsers are really similar, so as long as you’re using a recent browser version, it matters little which one your personal preference lies with.
More information @ WindowsTeamBlog
Review: Gold Class Media Centre PC
Posted Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 8:09 am by Jason Cartwright
Gold Rabbit is likely a company you’ve never heard of before. The short story is that it was started by Corwin Tse, Accounting and Finance graduate from University of Technology in Sydney. Tse believes Windows isn’t typically showcased in all of its glory, with low-end hardware in the race to the bottom, resulting in a less than desirable end-user experience.
In 2006′s International Microsoft/IDSA Next-Generation Windows PC Design Competition (later merged with the Imagine Cup), Tse’s design was shortlisted, motivating him to start Gold Rabbit. With that intro out of the way, lets talk hardware.
Design
The Gold Class Media Centre PC comes in a sleek black finish, perfect for blending right into your entertainment system and matching most of your other devices. The case feels solid and sturdy, when in turn means it weighs in at 10.9kg. Not light by any means, but its not something you’ll be moving around a lot, so lets move on.
Connectivity
If you want to connect it, chances are you can. Gold Class has a pretty awesome list of connectors. VGA, DVI, HDMI, Mini Display Port, 7.1 surround sound, 4x USB3, 4x USB2, TV tuner. Your really spoilt for choice with this. Don’t forget about the Ethernet or 802.11N wireless. Turns out wireless is a pretty killer feature in a desktop, something I’ve never experienced before. Simply connect power + HDMI and your away and racing.
While we’re talking about adding things, behind the the Gold Class’s front panel (flips down), there’s a Blu-ray drive also has 2 slots for a hot-swappable SATA drive. Not sure how many people have a media-filled hard drive laying around, but this is the second device that I’ve reviewed that features this option.
Experience
Something you’ll notice very quickly after firing up the Gold Class for the first time is its lack of trialware / bloatware – much appreciated. The Gold Class system features and SSD to get you booted into Windows quickly, on a side, SSD’s are still relatively expensive, but so very worth it.
Shipping with the Gold Class is a couple of accessories. The first is a Microsoft Arc keyboard (strangely no mouse), as well as a PC-enabled Xbox 360 controller. Timing is a little awkward with Games for Windows in hiatus until Xbox Live takes over the desktop gaming hub for Windows. Still, the intention is good.
It’s exciting to see a computer ship wit IE9, something even the big guys like Dell and HP aren’t even doing. Its great to have a hardware spec sheet as long as your arm, but ultimately the experience a user has is with the software. All Windows 7 users will be moved to IE9 eventually, so by shipping with IE9, its just saving time.
Performance
This machine was built to be a powerhouse and it is. Boot-time is impressive, launching applications is virtually instant, Blu-ray startup time was good (probably better than PS3). The bottom line is, this machine can take pretty much anything you can throw at it. One downside of this performance is always heat. The chassis design features a number of vents at the rear, sides and top of the case to allow the hot air to escape. Unfortunately the noise of the system is noticeable. Think Xbox 360 first version. While not a massive issue in-day-to-day use, while watching a movie, the quiet scenes are distracted by the noise.
Specs
- 4GB memory
- 1.8TB usable hard disk drive
- Blu-ray 3D player + burner
- 2 × digital + analogue terrestrial TV tuners
- Up to 300 hours of HDTV recording storage supplied
- 2 × internal hard disk drive expansion slots for additional recording time
- Up to 300,000 12 megapixel photo or 292,500 4-minute song or 300-hour 1080P video capacity
- HDMI 1.4a + Mini DisplayPort + dual-link DVI + S/PDIF output
- Dolby TrueHD + DTS-HD Master Audio output for AV receivers
- Bluetooth 2.1 + Wi-Fi 802.11n + Gigabit Ethernet wireless networking
- Xbox 360 Wireless Controller supplied
- 4 × Xbox 360 Wireless Controllers support
- DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 graphic effects
- 8 × USB ports 2 × front, 6 × back
- Wireless remote + keyboard
Price
The Gold Class comes in two versions.
- Gold Class with Blu-ray (Windows Experience Index of 7) – $2,800 (free delivery)
- Gold Class with DVD (Windows Experience Index of 6) – $2250 (free delivery)
That comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, but I’d suggest you’d be fitting the bill for shipping it back. There’s also a 3-year warranty, the terms of which I’m unsure of. Payment options available are currently PayPal and Direct Deposit, as Gold Rabbit grows these will need to extend to credit card etc. For more information about pricing visit Gold Rabbit.
Gallery
Overall
This machine lets you flick from recording 2 shows in HD via Windows Media Center, to playing a 3D games, to watching Blu-ray movie or surfing the web all on your HDTV. I think the decision to ship it without a mouse is an interesting one, probably something that could be included for little cost that would really complete the experience.
The remote was ok, not great. After a week of use i was still unable to comfortably know where buttons were without looking. The arrangement of key buttons was a little awkward, something that’s a must when your using it everyday.
One thing to be aware of is the control uses IR, this means using the Media Center button will turn on your Xbox 360 if its close by. I have a low-line entertainment unit which stores all the consoles and set-top-boxes, this happened multiple times. Actually its a difficult problem to solve, one of which only Boxee has really dealt with adequately by using RF.
Buying off an unknown company is always scary, that if your an enthusiast looking for a media centre PC and can’t be bothered building your own, then take a look, Gold Class may suit your needs. There’s a lot included for the price, but I can’t fathom paying $2k+ for a machine of any kind in 2011.
More information @ http://gold-rabbit.com/
The web just got more beautiful, IE9 officially released
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 6:38 pm by Jason Cartwright
Rolling out across the world right now is Microsoft’s latest browser – Internet Explorer 9. Turns out its already popular with the beta more than 40 million times.
New features
Internet Explorer 9 is fast, as in really fast. Today is the day we all need to be thankful Google Chrome entered the browser market because this is the result. Microsoft went back to the drawing board and thought about the types of activities that real people actually do day-to-day and made them better. These included browser startup-time, page load times and add-ons loaded to name a few.
Taking advantage of the underutilised horsepower inside a modern PC, IE9 uses the GPU to get content to your screen. Given most of today’s websites are heavily JavaScript-based, there’s been a brand new JavaScript engine under the hood, codenamed Chakra. This means scripts that execute when loading pages or interacting with sites all execute faster than ever before.
Clean User Interface
In this release, Microsoft has stripped back from any branding or unnecessary fluff, allowing websites to be front and centre. By default, your Menu bar, Favourites bar, status bar are all off to save valuable pixels. This also provides websites with more screen real estate to play with
Improved standard support
IE9 is also better with new format support, this means developers can start to create some new interactive experiences. Capitalizing on new HTML5 and CSS3 support, the apparently will be more beautiful.
Check out a new game in-browser game Way out wars, where players hear tracks from EMI playback. You gain points by typing the name of the artist of said song, the more points the faster you get it. If the time expires, your out. Take a second to View > Source and see the gorgeous clean code that drives it. Try it out yourself @ http://www.theinsong.com/wayoutwars/
Pinning sites
Something else that impacts website developers is the ability for users to pin your site on their Taskbar. This pushes your site to have the same importance as a desktop application. Take advantage of this by including Win7 Jump Lists.
With this release, IE is not longer the joke of browsers (looking at you IE6), but rather the new market leader. The great news is that when your non-tech-savy friends get a new computer, you won’t have to rush to throw Chrome on there, sorry Firefox but you snooze, you loose.
IE9 mobile
While we’re on browsers its interesting to read that the upcoming IE9 mobile on WP7 is being shown off at SXSW in Austin. Enough acronyms for you ?
IE9 is now available for everyone (not you XP users) to download today from www.beautyoftheweb.com.
Get a full run down of all the Internet Explorer 9 features here – http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/productguide/top-features
IE9 release date – Tuesday 15th
Posted Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:22 am by Jason Cartwright
Microsoft Australia has just confirmed the release date (and time) for IE9. Next Tuesday, also known as March 15th, 2011 at 8AM AEST you’ll be able to download the full version of IE9. To be honest if you haven’t already tried it, you should have. While your being all up-to-date, you might as well grab Adobe’s new Flash 10.3 beta from http://labs.adobe.com
You can get the release candidate of IE9 from http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/
IE9 Release Candidate now available
Posted Friday, February 11, 2011 at 7:06 am by Jason Cartwright
Microsoft’s IE9 has reached release candidate status today. There’s some nice updates available in RC over that of the beta. Visually the tabs have been revamped and squared off, which results in an overall cleaner UI.
Tabs
Along with the buzz cut square corners, tabs can now be placed on a row of their own. This allows you more screen real estate for those of us who get a little crazy with the number of simultaneous tabs. Something that frustrated me in the beta was that you couldn’t actually tear of a new tab into its own window on the about:tabs page, you actually had to enter an address before doing so. This has been fixed in IE9 RC.
Improved JavaScript Engine Performance
There’s also improved JavaScript engine performance, given that JS power a lot of today’s web, this is an very important focus area. Perceived ‘slowness’ of computer these days is often tied to the work we do on the web and while connection dependent, scripts are often the culprit of bad performing websites.
Dynamic GPU Usage
File this feature under the ‘freaking neat’ category, IE9 RC intelligently switched between hardware accelerated GPU rendering and software based rendering based on computer specs. This means you’ll be getting the best performance possibly without lifting a finger.
Standards
As you’d likely expect, there’s improved HTML5 and CSS3 support in the RC build.
Geolocation
Websites can now use the Geolocation API to tap into users location (with their permission of course) for use with maps or check-in services like Facebook, Foursquare etc.
WebM support
Internet Explorer 9 RC now supports playback of H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag and now Google’s WebM video format.
IE9 definitely seems faster than the beta and a quick test of a few sites I knew had issues, or required compatibility mode, seem to work much better. Microsoft are obviously keen to get as many people trying out the IE9 RC as possible, they have sponsored tweets about ‘Internet Explorer’, linking to the RC download.
Internet Explorer 9 RC is available from http://beautyoftheweb.com
IE9 downloaded 20 Million times
Posted Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 7:41 am by Jason Cartwright
Microsoft have just posted a juicy piece of information to fuel the browser war fire. Internet Explorer 9, still in beta, has been downloaded more than 20 Million times. A lot of the market share IE9 now occupies has been taken from previous versions of Internet Explorer.
In 2010, IE6 and IE7 use dropped over 40% and now only accounts for 22.98% of users worldwide. If your still using IE6, please do yourself a favour and update, security alone should be enough motivation. Everyday web developers are dropping support for IE6, so chances are your web experience is pretty broken, again, update now.
As for IE9, it launched on September 15th 2010 and now holds nearly 0.46% of web users. A relatively low percentage, highlighting just how many of us are online. Internet Explorer 9 will be released in the first half 2011, but expect IE9 beta 2 soon.
More @ WindowsTeamBlog
