IE 9 tells you to "Never Mind The Bullets"

[reactosguy]

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2010/09/26/ie9-tells-you-never-mind-the-bullets-in-comic-to-showcase-html5/

Microsoft has launched a new site to demo HTML5 in IE9 called “Never Mind The Bullets” – which is an interactive, hardware accelerated, HTML5, Old West themed comic book.  The site is designed to highlight the following HTML5 features:
 

• Font face loading
• SVG background
• Header & Section layout
• JavaScript acceleration
• CSS3 Multi-background
• Editable content

It's really amazing. Thank You Microsoft for offering an HTML5 comic!

I also have to ask, "Why Is Microsoft Recommending IE9 To Read This?" It's their marketing strategy. They're trying to bury people in their sands by convincing them that IE9 will give the best experience. As far as I can tell, the first page works under Firefox 3.6.10.

Please comment on the site. The first page of the site works on Firefox 3.6.10, and Microsoft can never change that fact without cheating on them.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I couldn't get it to work with Opera, for some reason it doesn't finish loading, then my Internet connection stops working so I have to reset my modem and router to look at any other sites, which seems ominous. I've tried setting the user agent to Internet Explorer and it still didn't work, the annoying message didn't go away, probably because Opera was identifying itself as IE 6 or something like that.

The whole thing works with Firefox and I think it's supposed to. If they wanted it to be IE only, they could've used Silverlight and ActivX controls but the whole point is to use HTML 5 which works on all browser.

I don't have IE 9 and can't  use it because it needs Vista or later. It's s bit jerky but that's to be expected as it's designed for IE9 which has hardware acceleration. The question is: could this be optimised for Firefox so it runs just as fast as it does under IE9 or is IE9 genuinely faster at rendering this kind of thing?

[piratePenguin]

wrt performance, MS have been blowing their trumpet saying that IE9 has hardware acceleration that a cross-platform browser (i.e. every other browser) cannot achieve, but this has been blown outof the water on mozilla blogs, where they are anticipating as gud or better performance. wrt javascript, see arewefastyet.com and you can see firefox 4 is close to or ahead of safari, and approaching chrome in performance, but the trend is pretty telling.

fx4 will unfortunately only have hw acceleration on windows, but i expect the rest will come after

[reactosguy]

The whole thing works with Firefox and I think it's supposed to. If they wanted it to be IE only, they could've used Silverlight and ActivX controls but the whole point is to use HTML 5 which works on all browser.

Microsoft could have made their own HTML5 tags. Fortunately, that didn't happen, either because MS employees could not think of tags because all of their ideas has been used, or Microsoft wants to use open standards.

Stupid stupid Microsoft tales. 

[Lead Head]

Interesting to see Microsoft embracing HTML5 so much. Wonder if this means they are going to ditch Silverlight? It seems to me that HTML5 will essentially be able to to the exact same things Flash/Silverlight can do today. Correct me if i'm wrong.

[Aloone_Jonez]

wrt performance, MS have been blowing their trumpet saying that IE9 has hardware acceleration that a cross-platform browser (i.e. every other browser) cannot achieve, but this has been blown outof the water on mozilla blogs, where they are anticipating as gud or better performance. wrt javascript, see arewefastyet.com and you can see firefox 4 is close to or ahead of safari, and approaching chrome in performance, but the trend is pretty telling.

We'll have to see which is faster. I think that IE will be faster than other browsers for some things (graphics, obviously) and other browsers will still beat it hands down in other areas such as Java.

fx4 will unfortunately only have hw acceleration on windows, but i expect the rest will come after

Yes, but I suppose for marketing purposes and Firefox vs IE flamewars, it doesn't matter that Firefox 4 only supports hardware acceleration on Windows as it's the only platform it can be compared to IE with and it would look bad if it didn't. Of course in reality it does matter that it won't work on other platforms and it's surprising that such an obvious enhancement as graphics acceleration wasn't thought of a version ago.

Microsoft could have made their own HTML5 tags. Fortunately, that didn't happen, either because MS employees could not think of tags because all of their ideas has been used, or Microsoft wants to use open standards.

Sorry, what are you talking about?

HTML5 a new web standard, perhaps you should see the Wikipedia link below. Microsoft should be praised for implementing it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

Interesting to see Microsoft embracing HTML5 so much. Wonder if this means they are going to ditch Silverlight? It seems to me that HTML5 will essentially be able to to the exact same things Flash/Silverlight can do today. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Yes it does, see Wikipedia.

It seems that MS have bowed to pressure from developers and have finally given them what they wanted. I don't know about Silverlight, according to Wikipedia it seems like MS want to continue with it, but I don't know that that means for HTML5 and SVG.

I notice that the demo doesn't include any sound or if it does it doesn't work with Firefox. If there's no sound, I wonder if it's because IE 9 doesn't yet support any free codecs?

[reactosguy]

HTML5 a new web standard, perhaps you should see the Wikipedia link below. Microsoft should be praised for implementing it.

 
I know that. I was saying that Microsoft could have made their own IE-specific tags for HTML5. They made up IE-specific tags for HTML 3 in the 90's so that HTML coders could use them and visitors would be forced to use IE just to visit a single stupid site.

[Aloone_Jonez]

All right, I see what you mean, yes it looks like MS have been playing to the rules for a change instead of making their own.

[reactosguy]

All right, I see what you mean, yes it looks like MS have been playing to the rules for a change instead of making their own.

I wonder if the same is going to happen to Microsoft's other products.

Interesting to see Microsoft embracing HTML5 so much. Wonder if this means they are going to ditch Silverlight? It seems to me that HTML5 will essentially be able to to the exact same things Flash/Silverlight can do today. Correct me if i'm wrong.

I think they're going to keep promoting Silverlight as an alternative to HTML5 "that does what HTML5 can't."

I heard somewhere that YouTube is going to keep Flash because the videos support HD, despite HTML5's (and especially Ogg's) efforts.

wrt performance, MS have been blowing their trumpet saying that IE9 has hardware acceleration that a cross-platform browser (i.e. every other browser) cannot achieve, but this has been blown outof the water on mozilla blogs, where they are anticipating as gud or better performance. wrt javascript, see arewefastyet.com and you can see firefox 4 is close to or ahead of safari, and approaching chrome in performance, but the trend is pretty telling.

I believe that IE will be faster in rendering graphics and text, but I believe that it will be out-sped by some other wacky browser.

fx4 will unfortunately only have hw acceleration on windows, but i expect the rest will come after

That would be a great start for Firefox, since most FF users run it on Windows.

Regardless, it would be nice to see it on other platforms.

I couldn't get it to work with Opera, for some reason it doesn't finish loading, then my Internet connection stops working so I have to reset my modem and router to look at any other sites, which seems ominous. I've tried setting the user agent to Internet Explorer and it still didn't work, the annoying message didn't go away, probably because Opera was identifying itself as IE 6 or something like that.

I think you're using an older version of Opera which doesn't support HTML5 at all or at least doesn't support it completely. If you are using a newer version, then I'll take that first statement in this paragraph back.

 

I don't have IE 9 and can't  use it because it needs Vista or later. It's s bit jerky but that's to be expected as it's designed for IE9 which has hardware acceleration.

I can't use IE9 as well since I have XP, but who cares? I believe hardware accelerating HTML5 features are cool but use too many resources.

The question is: could this be optimised for Firefox so it runs just as   fast as it does under IE9 or is IE9 genuinely faster at rendering this   kind of thing?

I think that even if IE9 is naturally faster at hardware acceleration, Firefox has a chance to out speed it by utilizing said features more efficiently.

[Lead Head]

Interesting to see Microsoft embracing HTML5 so much. Wonder if this means they are going to ditch Silverlight? It seems to me that HTML5 will essentially be able to to the exact same things Flash/Silverlight can do today. Correct me if i'm wrong.

I think they're going to keep promoting Silverlight as an alternative to HTML5 "that does what HTML5 can't."

I heard somewhere that YouTube is going to keep Flash because the videos support HD, despite HTML5's (and especially Ogg's) efforts.

YouTube's HTML5 player doesn't use Ogg. It uses H.264. H.264 + HTML5 support HD video just fine, but Mozilla will not implement an H.264 codec into Firefox since it is not FOSS. Youtube won't use Ogg because as of now, the bitrates required for decent quality streaming HD are too high.

I can't use IE9 as well since I have XP, but who cares? I believe hardware accelerating HTML5 features are cool but use too many resources.

Uh...? The idea of hardware acceleration, is that the GPU can do the bulk of the rendering work, letting the CPU be free to do other things. Hardware acceleration frees up resources.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I couldn't get it to work with Opera, for some reason it doesn't finish loading, then my Internet connection stops working so I have to reset my modem and router to look at any other sites, which seems ominous. I've tried setting the user agent to Internet Explorer and it still didn't work, the annoying message didn't go away, probably because Opera was identifying itself as IE 6 or something like that.

I think you're using an older version of Opera which doesn't support HTML5 at all or at least doesn't support it completely. If you are using a newer version, then I'll take that first statement in this paragraph back.

No, I'm using the latest version of Opera (10.62 at the time of posting) which probably supports HTML5 better than most browsers, especially Internet Explorer 9.

May be it is a bug in Opera? If this is the case it shouldn't fuck up my Internet connection, there must also be a vunerability in Windows (what a surprise?), a buggy browser shouldn't be able to stop the Internet from working.

EDIT1:
I'll have another go and I'll make sure I restard Opera if he Internet stops working. I don't think I tried that, even though it seems obvious.

EDIT2:
I've noticed that the more recent Opera versions seem to be less stable than the older ones. I was searching for a datasheet on Google but when I clicked on the link, Opera suddenly closed down without giving an error message.
http://focus.ti.com.cn/cn/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literatureNumber=slvu213&fileType=pdf

This is weird, other PDFs seem to be fine. I thought it could be a bug in the Sdobe plugin but it works in Firefox.

[piratePenguin]

I'm glad that no ones mentioned acid 3 or such tests lately, it's been found that browsers placing an emphasis on acid tests have been implementing minimum functionality in order to score points, but the required functions are useless at their task (other than to score points). Webkit developers have blogged about getting pissed off about this. Mozilla has down-played the importance of the acid tests from the start and played an honest game - the scores come slowly after much slavery ambushing internals to comply fully with the standards (functionally important parts first, score-relevant ones last).

There are too many reasons that I think I correctly regard Mozilla and not a bit of the rest as the 'savior' of the principles of the web - above the fact that Firefox actually saved those principles by becoming one of the most popular pieces of software ever.

Mozilla's stubbornness on H.264 is one of those reasons. H.264 is patented. The MPEG-LA control H.264 licenses to decode and encode (i.e. produce) H.264 videos. It would have costed Firefox in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars to support playback of H.264 videos, but the MPEG-LA actually are offering a gratis license for Firefox specifically, so why don't Mozilla accept that deal? (Other than the fact that it's a time-limited deal! disclaimer, this situation could have changed since I last was reading about this)
It's as clear as day that MPEG-LA are trying to create a monopoly on video (which they've done) and bring it to the web too. This should not be allowed to happen. Firefox will never implement a patented video codec for the same reason they rejected ActiveX support (yes, they had an implementation!). The web is for everyone. It's not for Windows users, and it should not be the way that you need to pay a licensing authority to produce video for it, or to play it back. There is nothing the MPEG-LA can do to make H.264 use acceptable in view of the original principles of the web above making it royalty free, for everybody. Making it faster and better than the competition does not achieve this. H.264 is a fair bit better than WebM because of a number of reasons, but it's all in the name: WebM fits in with the principles of the web, H.264 by MPEG-LA results in a stranglehold, again.

Firefox supports WebM and OGG. IE9 supports whatever the OS supports I THINK. This includes OGG and WebM AND H.264 all out of the box. Chrome does a similar thing to IE9 I think, and it supports all of them out of the box I think. Safari (including iPads, iPhone, iPods) supports H.264, and has no support for OGG or WebM out of the box. This is a major problem, but at least Apple are on their own on this one, without even MS to join them. Make your own mind up about Apple, abusing their control and market share over devices to push for a H.264 web. Thanks to them, developers can't make do with a single video file if they want to support free standards, remind you of anyone?

[Aloone_Jonez]

I've just moved back to Firefox after having lost a forum post in Opera when it crashed, I'm very disappointed with the poorer stability of more recent Opera releases. It never used to crash on me, now it's a fairly frequent occurrence. It's normally Google maps or reading a PDF which causes it to crash.

I'll stick with Firefox for now and will only move back to Opera if it's stable and Firefox 4 is as mediocre as 3.6.x

[Refalm]

IE9 supports whatever the OS supports I THINK.

IE9 will only support H.264 out of the box.
Maybe OGG and WebM can be supported through Windows Media Player with a codec pack. Or of course the Google Chrome Frame.

YouTube has a list of HTML5 video support:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

[reactosguy]

IE9 will only support H.264 out of the box.

Not only that, but if you install a certain codec, you get WebM support.

I'm glad that no ones mentioned acid 3 or such tests lately, it's been found that browsers placing an emphasis on acid tests have been implementing minimum functionality in order to score points, but the required functions are useless at their task (other than to score points). Webkit developers have blogged about getting pissed off about this. Mozilla has down-played the importance of the acid tests from the start and played an honest game - the scores come slowly after much slavery ambushing internals to comply fully with the standards (functionally important parts first, score-relevant ones last).

Acid3 is a bad test. Hopefully Acid4 doesn't get it wrong.

Mozilla's stubbornness on H.264 is one of those reasons. H.264 is patented. The MPEG-LA control H.264 licenses to decode and encode (i.e. produce) H.264 videos. It would have costed Firefox in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars to support playback of H.264 videos, but the MPEG-LA actually are offering a gratis license for Firefox specifically, so why don't Mozilla accept that deal? (Other than the fact that it's a time-limited deal! disclaimer, this situation could have changed since I last was reading about this)

According to DiveIntoHTML5.org, MPEG-LA wants another monopoly over video formats.

Firefox supports WebM and OGG. IE9 supports whatever the OS supports I THINK. This includes OGG and WebM AND H.264 all out of the box. Chrome does a similar thing to IE9 I think, and it supports all of them out of the box I think. Safari (including iPads, iPhone, iPods) supports H.264, and has no support for OGG or WebM out of the box. This is a major problem, but at least Apple are on their own on this one, without even MS to join them. Make your own mind up about Apple, abusing their control and market share over devices to push for a H.264 web. Thanks to them, developers can't make do with a single video file if they want to support free standards, remind you of anyone?

Here's a table to see whether a browser supports a video format or not.

---------------	Firefox	Chrome	Internet Explorer	Safari	Opera	Android
Ogg Theora	3.5+	5.0+			10.5+
H.264		5.0+	9.0+	3.0+		2.0+
WebM	4.0+	6.0+	9.0+ (with codec)		10.6+	Future

Blank columns mean no support for a video format.