Acid3 test updated

I find it interesting that the much mentioned Acid 3 test was recently updated.  As a result of this change, IE9 now passes with a score of 100.  Although it is still slow on test 26 and requires multiple tries on test 69.  For those of you who don’t know, the 5 tests that IE9 was failing had to do with SVG fonts and SVG animation, which are not W3C standards.  It would appear that Acid 3 has recognized this fact and removed the test.  My point here is that test suites are only valuable if they correctly implement the standards that they are testing.  Was Acid 3 wrong before?  No, but it was testing for something that it appears is unlikely to become a standard.

A couple of quick tests of the browsers that I have installed using the Acid 3 test shows that all passed but had to retry several times on test 69.  Of the browsers that I have installed only Google Chrome 14 meet the 30fps requirement on test 26.  Interestingly, GC 14 wasn’t the fastest overall in spite of being the leader in test 26.  That honor goes to IE9 at 0.26 seconds.  To compare, Firefox 5.0 took 1.81 seconds, Firefox 6.0 took 2.22 seconds (not sure why it took longer than 5.0), Google Chrome 14 took 0.61 seconds, IE10pp3 running in a VirtualBox took 1.12 seconds.  I discount the speed of IE10 since it could not take advantage of any hardware acceleration due to being the virtual environment and programs in general take about 20% longer to run there. 

So, what does all this mean?  Nothing.  Well, ok, progress is being made.  My major complaint is that Microsoft seems unwilling to provide a fully standards compliant browser for older editions of Windows (Like XP and Vista—Never mind Vista, but XP would be nice).  Now I understand why Microsoft doesn’t want to put all of the new features of IE10 into XP, but it would be nice to see the new rendering engine back fitted to IE8 (maybe call it IE10 Lite).  This would greatly serve to move the web forward without having much if any impact on Microsoft’s bottom line.

Windows 8 & IE10

Ok, I've had a chance to try the new Windows 8 developer preview and IE10. 

First Windows, the new user interface is going to take some getting used to before I like it.  Personally, it feels too much like a smart phone and not enough like a desktop computer.  Still, I see it being a very good choice for touch enabled devices. (Most of your tablets, smart phones and many laptops to come) 

Second IE10, contrary to some reports, you CAN use third party add-ins.  However, at least for now, you can only use them in the "desktop" mode.  The good news here is that I was able to load several popular addins that worked with IE9 onto IE10 without any problems.

The speed of IE10 isn't great at this point (about 10% slower on several javascript tests), but that really isn't surprising. I seriously doubt that Microsoft has even start to optimize for speed yet.  (Bear in mind that this is pre-beta software)  Given the early state of this software it will be interresting to see what level of performance we get once Microsoft fine tunes everything.

Microsoft's continued progress toward standards compliance is nice to see, but more work remains to be done in this area.  There were improvements in every HTML5 test suite that I tried.

A question that remains: Will Microsoft release IE10 before Windows 8?  Personally, I doubt that that will happen, or if it does, it will be days or at most weeks before the release of Windows.

Links from WGDForum Meeting

Ok, here are the links to the jQuery Plugins that I discussed at the WGDForum meeting.

imageZoom This is a simple to used magnifier for an image on the page. You need to supply both a small image and the larger (hidden) image. Neat effect, but since the larger image will increase you page's load time, you'll want to use this sparingly.

textLimit a quick way to provide feedback to the user about the amount of space remaining in a text field and to limit the input to a specified length

ajaxFileUpload Ok, this isn't really using AJAX to upload files since that isn't possible, but the effect is the same.

chronoStrength This is a neat way to get your users to use stronger passwords. I intend to add this to several of my web applications.

aero-window Vista / Windows 7 style aero "windows". Nice effect

GSUGGEST A simple Google style suggest. Suggestion can be provided via either inline code or from the server via AJAX

double select list A simple double list where the second list changes based on the selection in the first list.

Update.

Ok, after a bit more testing of IE9 PP7, it appears that you get wildly variable results depending on the hardware platform. I'll post the details later, but running on my Core2 Duo laptop, I got results that are more in keeping with what Microsoft is claiming. I guess that Microsoft has optimized for more modern processors. While this isn't unexpected, it is a bit of a disappointment. On my older hardward, GC and even Firefox are much faster than IE9. On a laptop that is only 2 years newer, the picture reverses--Strange.

Internet Explorer 9 may not be as good as Microsoft claims

I've been doing some testing of the latest version of the IE 9 Platform and I don't seem to be getting the same types of numbers that Microsoft is claiming. Ignoring for the moment that it still doesn't pass Acid 3 (and probably won't from the comments that I've read), here are the results of an admittedly un-scientific test using sun spider 0.91. IE8 8700ms, Chrome 7.0.517.44 481ms, IE9 5267ms or IE9 is about 1.65 times as fast as IE8 and 10.9 times SLOWER than chrome 7. Now, Microsoft claims 3746, 262 and 216 respectively or basically that IE9 is 17 times faster than IE8 and slightly faster than Chrome 7. Clearly they are testing on a much faster maching that I'm running (a Pentium dual core 3.2ghz, with 8GB ram--windows experience index of 4.9) but that shouldn't cause this much skew in the data.

I'll be testing this further on a rather newer machine in the near future and will post the results of those test when they are completed. Anybody testing this for themselves, I'd love to hear your results (just post a comment)

Video Codec detector

I just had my attention brought to an excelent utility for detecting exactly what codec that you need to install to view a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Try it out and see for yourself.

Converting WMF files to JPG

Recently, I had call to convert .WMF files to .JPG.  Now there are any number of commercial and shareware solutions to this problem, but as a programmer, I wanted to do this myself.  This turns out to be fairly easy using C++Builder.  Here is the code:

TMetafile * mf = new TMetafile(); 
TJPEGImage * jpeg = new TJPEGImage();
Graphics::TBitmap * bmp = new Graphics::TBitmap();
mf->LoadFromFile("c:\\testdata\\sample.wmf");
bmp->SetSize(mf->Width,mf->Height);
bmp->Canvas->Draw(0,0,mf);
jpeg->Assign(bmp);
jpeg->CompressionQuality = 50;
jpeg->SaveToFile("c:\\testdata\\sample.jpg");
delete mf;
delete bmp;
delete jpeg;

And, of course, with very little change, this can be used to convert a BMP to JPG:

 TJPEGImage * jpeg = new TJPEGImage();
 Graphics::TBitmap * bmp = new Graphics::TBitmap();
 bmp->LoadFromFile("c:\\testdata\\sample.bmp");
 jpeg->Assign(bmp);
 jpeg->CompressionQuality = 50;
 jpeg->SaveToFile("c:\\testdata\\sample.jpg");
 delete bmp;
 delete jpeg;