It’s true; Windows Me was a very rushed project and had countless issues with stability and general design. However, I hold up FrontPage as the worse product because it stuck around longer and did more damage to the web, while Windows Me was just laughed off stage by the general public.

FrontPage’s problem – or rather, one of its problems, for there were several – was that it targeted a novice audience and provided a WYSIWYG interface. There’s no problem with either of these things, it’s the combination that makes them bad. Contrary to popular (or perhaps, elitist) opinion, WYSIWYG can be a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced developer who understands the HTML/CSS behind it. In the hands of a novice, it easily creates two things: websites that are complete rubbish and web designers who have no real technical understanding of how websites work.

So when I first stumbled upon WebMatrix (Microsoft’s newest attempt at capturing the novice web designer audience) back in August, my stomach churned with dread. Memories of FrontPage came flooding back faster than you can say the word “frameset”.

After reminding myself that it isn’t fair to judge a product you’ve never used solely on the history of the developer, I decided to give WebMatrix a shot. Astonishingly, it’s actually not that bad.

The first major thing I noticed was that there is no WYSIWYG interface, which was a bit of a shock. The editor is essentially a standard code editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting for multiple languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also has highlighting for a number of server-side languages including – much to my surprise – PHP.

Auto-completion has been added with the WebMatrix 2 beta and it’s more or less what you would expect from Microsoft’s IntelliSense team. It provides easy access to reference material for a variety of languages. I feel this is especially important with PHP because it has a very large, relatively unorganized, inconsistently named collection of functions that no human could possibly memorize. It’s such an important feature that I think not including it in the original release of WebMatrix was a mistake.

WebMatrix's autocomplete (IntelliSense) showing some PHP functions

Along with autocomplete, the WebMatrix 2 beta also introduces an inline colour picker.

There’s not much else to say about the code editor. It’s relatively light on some of the more advanced features that have become commonplace in most IDEs; code folding, for example, is notably absent.

With the WebMatrix 2 beta in front of me, I decided to try deploying one of the available CMS options. I went with WordPress for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see WebMatrix working with a product not designed for a Microsoft platform (WordPress is powered by PHP and MySQL, both of which can run on Windows but it’s not the same as a CMS specifically designed for the Windows environment like DotNetNuke). Secondly, WordPress is something I’m already very familiar with (this blog runs on WordPress, in case you didn’t notice).

Site from Web Gallery

Because WebMatrix is bundled with an express version of IIS 7.5 (which it uses as a local testing environment), when I downloaded WordPress I was also forced to download PHP and MySQL versions for IIS.

One thing I noticed with the WordPress installation was that I wasn’t able to specify my own database name and credentials. This can be a problem on shared hosting where users are sometimes forced to have their database names prefixed with their username or something similar. In this instance, it was necessary to manually edit the configuration file after WordPress was uploaded to the server.

The upload was done over FTP; Web Deploy was offered as an alternative publishing method but once again, that’s an IIS specific feature and here we’re dealing with Apache on FreeBSD.

The FTP transfer succeeded without issue but I was very disappointed with the transfer monitoring tools (or lack thereof). The user is presented with a yellow box at the bottom of the window which displays the path to the current file at the top of the transfer queue along with links to cancel the transfer and to view the transfer log. It does not indicate fundamental information you would expect from the most basic FTP clients like how many files have finished transferring; how many files are still in the queue; the size, transfer rate or progress of the file currently at the top of the queue.

WordPress being deployed via FTP

Furthermore, clicking the “Log” link opens a static copy of the log in Notepad. There are so many things wrong with this. The log is not updated on the user’s screen in real time (you have to close notepad and click the link again to reopen the latest version). Notepad being a plain text editor, you also miss out on highlighting and a lot of other useful features often used in logging systems. The whole FTP experience feels overly simplified to the point that it’s just barely functional. I’m not sure if this is because Microsoft wants to encourage people to use Web Deploy or because they just haven’t had a chance to work on the FTP side of things. All I can say is the FTP interface needs a lot of attention.

WebMatrix's FTP log

With all of the above said, it’s hard to see how WebMatrix is really much of an improvement over traditional methods when it comes to deploying a CMS like WordPress. It uses more or less the same process but it seems like there’s more hoops to jump through and I’m not sure what the goal is supposed to be. Once you have the CMS installed you shouldn’t really have to do much more coding, if any at all (we’re targeting the novice market, remember). In that case, you’re basically using WebMatrix as a crippled FTP browser; even Windows Explorer would be a better option.

Getting back to user-created content, WebMatrix basically combines a file browser, a code editor, and a simplified IIS management interface into one package. The local project management works pretty well from what I can see and the tabbed editor provides a good coding experience especially given the addition of autocomplete.

Overall I think it’s a great project with a lot of potential, but there is significant room for improvement. I’m still undecided as to whether I would recommend WebMatrix to an amateur web developer. If all you’re looking to do is deploy an existing CMS like WordPress, don’t bother. Stick to the installation instructions bundled with those packages; at this point, WebMatrix adds nothing of substance to the process. If on the other hand you’re starting a site from scratch or you’re learning the basics of HTML/CSS, well this might just be the tool for you.

I’ve always been a fan of Valve’s games and the Portal series is no exception. When Portal 2 first came out I found myself among many people playing with a makeshift version of the Source SDK specifically for Portal 2 (basically just the Alien Swarm SDK with a custom FGD). Things started getting lively over at the Thinking With Portals website (the biggest Portal mapping site on the net), where I am a staff member.

After the official Portal 2 Authoring Tools beta was released, Valve contacted Thinking With Portals asking if we would be interested in running a mapping competition if they provided some prizes. We jumped on the opportunity.

Even though we were only given two weeks to accept submissions, the response we got from the community was astounding. Our initial projections estimated a total of between seventy and one hundred maps.

When submissions closed, the grand total was two hundred and thirty-seven maps (one hundred and ninety-five singleplayer and forty-two cooperative).

Wow.

We’re now executing the surprisingly arduous task of sorting through those maps and judging them. Given that each map takes about 10-20 minutes to play, it’s going to be a while until we’re done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Despite the fact that Australia itself has borne the consequences of several natural disasters recently, I think it’s already time to remind people that the commercial media cannot be trusted to consistently report accurately during times of disaster. The media thrives on sensationalism and natural disasters are an excellent source of sensational stories. When a news studio rushes to get the story out first, there is less time for fact-checking and research. This only adds to the problem on a topic such as nuclear energy, because most journalists don’t have a clue what they’re talking about when it comes to such subjects.

Long story short, please take what you hear, see and read on the news with mountainous piles of salt.

“… adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want…”

Indeed. I write about this because I recently played the multiplayer PC demo for Crysis 2. Technical issues related to GameSpy prevented many matches from starting when the demo was first released, leaving gamers sitting and waiting in server lobbies for hours on end. During that time many of us chat amongst ourselves about various topics and it wasn’t long until the word filter made its presence known.

This is a game that is ostensibly targeted at adults. If it were to be released here in Australia, I would wager that it would earn no less than an MA15+ rating. Not only is the game violent but it actually includes verbalisations of the very words the chat filter refuses to let gamers say. One particular scenario that springs to mind is that when the player is killed, they often hear a vocal taunt from the killer’s character. These are not the players themselves using these taunts, they are automatically played lines pre-recorded by Crytek. One of the particularly colourful ones is:

“Enjoy being dead, motherfucker!”

Now, I’m exposed to that kind of language frequently, so I don’t personally find it particularly offensive but my understanding is that if one were to write a list of the most vulgar words in the English language (as accepted by the wider community), the word “motherfucker” would have to be pretty high on that list. The game is quite liberal with these words and yet paradoxically tells its players they are not mature enough to read them in a chat channel. Any word Crytek (or possibly GameSpy) deems offensive is replaced with asterisks and that includes larger words which contain the same spellings.

So given that words like “ass” and “anal” are blocked, the word filter also blocks perfectly innocuous words such as “assassin” or “analyse”. Then there are words that I have never seen as even remotely offensive such as “thick” which are also blocked.

What’s the line of thought here, Crytek? Are you trying to stop players from bullying each other? It’s not as if the filter is hard to bypass and history has shown that if you try to remove or defuse swear words, new ones simply take their place. It wasn’t long before I started seeing people type “fuct” instead of “fucked” and personally it was the deliberate misspelling that offended me most.

Putting Crytek’s blatant hypocrisy aside, it’s not their responsibility to set the standard of conduct on servers they don’t own. There are indeed multiplayer servers for online first person shooters that have a “no swearing” rule but the vast majority don’t. It’s up to individual communities to set their own standards of player conduct which are enforced by the server administrators of those communities, not the developers of the game.

What immediately struck me about this particular phenomenon is the cause that it is ostensibly helping. Here is one of the many versions of the message currently floating around on Facebook:

“Change your profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal is to not see a person’s face on facebook until december 9th. Raise awareness and end child abuse!”

Once again, I’d like to immediately preface the rest of this post by saying that I have no problem with the activity in and of itself and speaking as one who knows many people who have suffered from child abuse, the cause in question is not one I take lightly.

What annoys me, however, is when this sort of activity claims to help fight for a cause such as child abuse when in reality it does nothing of the kind. The rationalization provided is that it helps to spread awareness and I suppose, to some very small extent, it does; just not on a significant level. It briefly attracts people’s attention to the topic of child abuse and may even stimulate a conversation or two between some participants but it does absolutely nothing constructive beyond that.

What we have in front of us is a game that somebody wanted to play which has, at some point, been wrapped in the flag of a righteous cause in order to encourage more people to participate. This works well of course. It is the same principle that most chain mails were built on; an email would be constructed with some provocative content and would encourage readers to send the email on to a certain number of people in order to achieve some goal or another.

Fortunately, in recent years people have woken up to the fact that chain mails do not achieve anything other than time wasting and they have become a much less common occurrence. This trend on Facebook is constructed more or less the same way. Why is the end date December 9th? That’s a good question; I can’t find any evidence to suggest that the 9th of December, the first two weeks of December or even the entire month of December are at all significant when it comes to child abuse awareness. The Australian Federal Police in conjunction with Bravehearts and NAPCAN hold a “National Child Protection Week” every September. The United States Department of Health & Human Services cites April as “National Child Abuse Prevention Month”. The Women’s World Summit Foundation says the 19th of November is the “World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse”. The 9th of December is a completely arbitrary date chosen simply to keep the trend alive.

Raising awareness on a topic such as child abuse requires more than simply stating, “there’s child abuse out there”. In today’s modern society, I doubt there is anyone out there that isn’t already aware of that. In order to truly help a cause as significant as this, people must be educated. Not only must parents be encouraged to talk to their children but people in general need to be introduced to the topic more thoroughly. For instance, when someone says “child abuse”, most people immediately think of sexual and physical abuse. It is important to remember that abuse extends into emotional and psychological areas, as well as just general neglect. Many people today still do not realise that in most cases of child abuse, it is not the stranger but the trusted friend or family member that commits such a horrible crime. Very few people know what to do or who to turn to if someone they know is being abused, or if they are being abused themselves. Existing abuse victims who quite often understandably hide their abuse within the deepest recesses of their memories are not all aware that there are people who still love and support them. People they can turn to for help.

This Facebook trend approaches none of these issues and it offends me that so many people take part and feel virtuous about doing so when in reality they have made more or less no difference in the real world. They have made themselves feel good about making a difference when they have done nothing of the sort. This kind of chain activity has very little efficacy in the goal of raising awareness and certainly does nothing to “end child abuse”.

If you want to take part in this sort of activity just for the fun of it, then I would encourage you to do so but do not be mistaken in thinking that it helps to fight for some cause or another because, quite simply, it doesn’t.

Similarly, if you wish to make a difference in the world and have chosen to help a cause such as child abuse awareness and prevention, I salute you for that but make sure that what you’re doing actually is making a difference.

Further reading for those so inclined:
http://www.asca.org.au – Adults Surviving Child Abuse
http://www.napcan.org.au/get-involved – NAPCAN: Get Involved
http://www.kidshelp.com.au – Kids Help Line
http://www.bravehearts.org.au/responding_to_CSA.ews – Bravehearts: Responding to Child Sexual Assault

I’ve always been a huge fan of the Half-Life series. I’ve played through it more times than I can possibly remember but it occurred to me recently that I’ve never played through it on hard. I don’t often play shooters on hard because they tend to be more frustrating that challenging. I made an exception for Half-Life 2, though, partly because I was bored but mostly because I put a lot of trust in Valve’s design skill. After making the change I quickly found the gameplay to be one of the most intense gaming experiences I’ve had.

I’ve found myself constantly taking cover, thinking tactically about each encounter and more than once yelling “SHIT!” when a Combine soldier with a shotgun came swiftly around a corner.

Some of the more climactic battles are more than intense though; they return me to the frustration that so frequently puts me off playing games on hard. One particular battle just outside of Nova Prospekt has you fighting against combine soldiers and two gunships.

Now, if you’re playing on easy, a gunship takes exactly three rockets to bring down, which means if you’re skilled enough in steering the rockets past the gunship’s defences you can take it down without running around looking for extra ammunition.

On hard, a gunship takes roughly seven rockets to take down, which means in this particular scenario, you’re going to have to run to the exposed ammo crate a bare minimum of five times. The gunships cover each other remarkably well and will easily shave off tens of health points if you stand still in open (for instance, next to the ammo crate) for more than a second or two.

The whole area took me about an hour and several quicksaves to complete. On easy this would typically be five minutes at the most and without dying or quickloading.

This is exactly why I was dreading the three turret battles inside Nova Prospekt but I found them to be one of the easiest parts of the whole game because I elected to do something I had never attempted before and which I’m sure was not intended by Valve’s level designers.

When I headed off to the second turret battle I carried the two turrets from the first battle with me. When I got there I grabbed all the medkits and ammo I could find and piled it up under the health and suit chargers.

I then set up the two turrets that I carried with me on the right side of the room, opened the cabinets containing the three turrets for this battle and set them up on the left side of the room. I then promptly hid inside the cabinets like a little girl until the battle was over.

I didn’t lose a single unit of health or armour. I did have to destroy two manhacks with the gravity gun and one of the turrets got kicked over by a soldier at one point; apart from that, I didn’t really have to do anything in what otherwise should have been a fairly intense battle. In fact it was quite a shame to have such a huge stash of health and ammo and not having any need for it.

Afterwards I decided the best thing to do would be to carry all five turrets to the third battle (the one that takes place at the portal). For those that don’t remember, or haven’t played Half-Life 2 (shame on you), halfway between the second and third battle you run into an ambush. The lights go off, flares go on, soldiers come in. As you might expect, this ambush is nothing to worry about when you have five turrets in front of you.

When I got to the third area, I was of course given another three turrets, bringing the total size of my little turret army to eight. There are only three entrances that the combine use to assault this arena so eight turrets is kind of overkill.

It’s just a shame that I couldn’t take the turrets with me through the portal. I had grown fond of the little guys.

SeaTools, if you weren’t already aware, is Seagate’s self-booting hard disk diagnostic software which it provides for its Barracuda and Maxtor drives. After examining the drive for less than a minute, SeaTools declared that the drive was physically damaged and needed to be replaced. A depressing but not entirely unexpected turn of events.

Now, I live out in the sticks, which means that if I’m to attempt an acquisition of computer hardware at a decent price it has to be ordered from out of town and typically takes about a week to get here. Since I planned to reinstall Windows on the replacement drive, I felt it unnecessary to install it anywhere else before it gets here which meant I had to spend the week on Ubuntu.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux (or perhaps more accurately, I have a certain degree of respect for Linux), but it’s not something that I have a huge amount of experience with or something that is of particular use to me. Most of my games and software are not Linux compatible, for instance, and while I am perfectly aware of the existence of software packages such as Wine, it seems like a lot of trouble to go to when I’m just going to be back on Windows in a matter of days anyway. Being on a Linux distro for a few days was enough for me to learn a bunch of things though, like the fact that Firefox is complete rubbish. As I’m an IE user that might sound like zealous ignorance, but I’ve always been of the opinion that Firefox was a good alternative until I was actually forced to use it for an extended period of time. It does all sorts of silly things like freezes when trying to view a large SVG file; I thought surely this must be me but after talking to some other people it seems the problems are quite prevalent. A friend encouraged me to try Google Chrome and it’s a much smoother alternative, so I’ll keep that in mind whenever I have to revisit Linux. IE has certainly had a whole spectrum of problems in the past, but at least it has shown gradual improvement from version to version (the latest of which I think is more or less on par with the other browsers) whereas Firefox appears to be getting more bloated. While still on Linux I managed to back up 99% of the important data from damaged drive before it finally failed completely.

During the week I was on Linux I also contracted gastroenteritis which made staying awake and doing more or less anything utterly exhausting and it refused to go away until I got a prescription of antibiotics leading me to believe that it was bacterial rather than viral.

Not that it was easy to get a prescription, mind you. As I’ve established earlier, I live out in the middle of nowhere, and when I got to the hospital there was only one doctor present in A&E which meant I had to wait 5 hours or so on the worlds hardest mattress before being seen. I did get better on the antibiotics though, which is something.

After a few days back at home, my new drive arrived and promptly started showing signs of failure.

It's so shiny!

It was, more or less, at this point that I concluded perhaps jamming forks into my eyes would be a less painful alternative to dealing with this computer. Nevertheless, I spent a significant amount of time diagnosing the issue. The drive would work for a while and then suddenly become unresponsive. It would spin up and then stop with a click sound, over and over again until either the operating system or the SATA controller decided it was not worth talking to anymore, which suggests either a power or mechanical problem (my money being on the latter). I booted up SeaTools once more and ran the long test, which worked for about 44 minutes before stopping abruptly and falling back to the FreeDOS CLI. The drive had cut out again in the middle of the test.

I fiddled with my hardware configurations and made sure all the cables were nice and snug, then ran the SeaTools long test a second time.

Now if you’re particularly thick, you might not immediately realize that the long test takes a long time. SeaTools will examine every single sector on the disk and it can do this at around 250000 sectors per second. The problem lies in the fact that a 1TB drive such as the one being scanned contains roughly 1.96 billion sectors which means the test takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes to complete. After running through the test successfully, I decided to change my hardware configuration back to the way it was before and run the test again. It completed successfully in roughly the same amount of time.

Now, if a disk is under heavy load for nearly 5 hours straight and every single sector of that disk is accessed, you can conclude with a reasonable level of certainty that a problem such as the one previously described is no longer present.

When discussing this issue I was told that the likely source of the problem was a small mechanical defect caused during manufacture, which was simply worn down after heavy use of the drive; not unlike loosening a rusty hinge by working it hard. This makes sense given my conclusions in the previous paragraph and the fact that I have not had any problems with the drive since.

The scrollwheel on my mouse has started playing up and I think I might be getting sick yet again. All in all, these past few weeks have not been particularly pleasant ones. Having said that I do hope to get back into updating this site once more.

In an effort to “make some f$*&ing money already”, Valve has introduced the Mann Co. Store, making a large quantity of items in TF2 available for purchase using the recently introduced Steam Wallet. However, all items can still be found using the old methods of random drops and achievements. “Segregating players into groups that can’t play together, based on who bought what, is something we’d like to avoid.”, says Valve. “Any items affecting gameplay, and even most purely cosmetic items, will still be obtainable simply by playing the game.”

Thank god for that; not that I would personally expect anything less from Valve, but anyone who has played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online can testify as to how easily paid updates can split a community.

If you’re greeted with a “The Mann Co. Store is currently closed” message when you fire up the game, this can usually be fixed with a Steam restart. The main page of the Mann Co. store shows a featured item, special offers, and an introduction written by none other than Saxton Hale.

You can start browsing through the store by clicking one of the categorized tabs at the top of the screen. Valve hasn’t disclosed what method they are using to determine item prices, but at a cursory glance it appears to be related with how common a certain item is in the community. Older and more common items such as the Axtinguisher are as low as 49 US cents at the time of writing, whereas most new items are up around the $5 mark.

Valve is planning to allow community contributors to make some coin via the Mann Co. store, but details are pretty sketchy on this at the moment.

 While browsing the store, items are displayed with a description and a 3d preview. Details such as customization support are also shown (certain items can now be painted different colours and given custom names).

The update includes the winning entries of the Polycount contest as part of the 65 new items that have been added. Valve have kept the names chosen by the authors, but have of course selected their own attributes for the purposes of balanced gameplay. I won’t go into heavy detail because there are too many items for the scope of this post, but you can read all about them on the TF2 website.

An interesting addition as part of the Polycount pack is set bonuses. Players receive a bonus such as increased movement speed if all items from a set are equipped at once. To keep things balanced, the positive bonus is paired with a negative bonus as well.

The loadout screen has been updated to accommodate the Mann Co. catalogue (which essentially shows the same information as the Mann Co. store, just without the purchasing component), and the new trading interface, a long-desired feature amongst the community.

When opening the trade interface, you are prompted to select a player from your steam friends list, the current server you are connected to (if applicable), or you can send a request to someone’s steam profile page. The trading screen is more or less what you would expect based on similar trading systems in other games such as World of Warcraft. The screen shows your inventory, along with 4 slots to send items and 4 slots to receive, and “ready to trade” checkboxes for both players which must be checked before a trade can be executed. Items that can’t be traded, such as the cheater’s lament, are dimmed out. Under the inventory is a chat interface allowing you to properly seal the deal.

Items that were found or crafted prior to the update are prefixed with the word “Vintage” and have a blue name. This doesn’t seem to apply to headgear and misc items.

By far the biggest update to TF2 since its release in late 2007, this adds a lot to the game. To be honest, I’m not sure that the prices are worth it for the vast majority of players but there’s no reason they won’t change in the future, and all items with significant gameplay effect are still obtainable for free, so it’s not a big deal. I think the opportunity for community member to not only contribute to the game but make some cash doing it is also a good thing, and not something you see in a lot of games.

The Interface  

An important part of a web browser (or any application for that matter) is the user interface. It’s one of the most immediately noticeable things when you start the beta for the first time. A particularly awkward change is the relocation of the tabs to the right of the address bar. This strikes me as a little odd, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a very negative reaction from customers regarding the move. After some thought, it occurs to me that indeed, there is no reason that the address bar needs to consume the entire width of the browser window; however, to make the most of a tabbed browsing experience, the tabs need to have as much space as possible. Squashing them in next to the address bar doesn’t add much to the browsing experience unless you count the thirty odd pixels worth of vertical space saved, but on high resolution screens which dominate the consumer market today, the space saved is tiny and is not worth the detriment to the tabbing interface. You can actually resize the width of address bar, but you don’t want it to be so small that you can barely see the domain name. So the effect on the tabs is still quite strong, especially if you’re a heavy tabs user.  

The search box has been merged with the address bar. This is also awkward at first but I think it’s a change I can get used to. It does this particularly annoying thing where it goes straight to the “top result” in the search, but sometimes it just shows the search page. After a bit of investigating, I found you can turn this off in the search options, but in my opinion its inconsistency and unpredictability makes it a fairly useless feature to begin with.  

You may be noticing a trend, which is that Microsoft is going for a very minimalist approach to IE9′s GUI, cutting it down as much as possible so that it’s the webpage that stands out, not the browser itself. While this can work for some people, it doesn’t for everyone, especially power users; it would be okay if there was room for customization, but there isn’t. I really want to see the option to move those tabs back to their own space below the address bar.  

Despite the tab bar’s unnecessary displacement, tab management has improved. You can now drag a tab out of the window to form its own window, or drag a tab into another window.  

Dragging a tab outside of a window

 A new feature which IE  has desperately needed for many years now is a download manager. It’s such a relief to finally see this implemented. Downloading in previous versions was messy at best; each download would have its own window which couldn’t be paused, and support for large files (anything over a gigabyte or so) was virtually non-existent. Downloads are now managed in a single window and can be paused and resumed. A default download folder can be set to avoid the “Save As…” prompt you’re usually hit with in previous versions. Large files are now supported properly as well. Curiously enough, there is neither a progress bar nor a download speed indicator in the download manager, the latter of which strikes me as one of the fundamental elements of any download manager, so it’s a bit strange for it not to be present.

In a further effort to make the interface less disruptive, Microsoft has moved the notification bar to the bottom of the screen. This actually works too well for me, and I’ve heard similar comments from people in the community. Typically your focus is at the top of the browser to the middle, when content gets down low, people usually scroll up. Several times the notification bar has popped up and I have failed to notice it for some time. It’s great that the overall browsing experience isn’t interrupted, but notifications are important and should be a little more noticeable. This is another area where I think there should be more customization available. Given the option to move the notification bar back to the top of the browser and to set which notifications can appear would be an improvement.

Performance and Standards Compliance

Another thing that’s immediately noticeable when I first opened the beta is that it starts up much faster than previous versions of Internet Explorer. This seems like the first version of IE where performance has been a major design goal. Microsoft has replaced the abhorrently slow JavaScript engine used in previous versions with a completely new engine dubbed “Chakra”. At the time of writing, the IE9 beta scores 95/100 on Acid3 which is a significant improvement on IE8′s score of 20. Hopefully we’ll see that score reach the 100 mark in a future build prior to release. The beta also completely passes the selectors test at CSS3.info. The new engine has full support for HTML5 including the canvas element and various media components such as H.264 video. SVG is also fully supported, including both SVG files and inline SVG elements.

Hardware accelerated rendering makes for a much smoother browsing experience, especially on pages that are rich in content. For instance, since images are held in the GPU’s private memory, re-rendering pages rich in images is remarkably fast. The use of DirectWrite results in much nicer looking text.

There’s still some things that need to be ironed out but overall, the renderer in IE9 is a fantastic improvement on older versions.

Windows 7 Integration

One of the more interesting and unique features of the IE9 beta is how it integrates with Windows 7. You can pin sites to the taskbar by dragging a tab down to an empty space on the bar, much the same way as you would pin a regular windows application. Launching a pinned site starts a customized IE window with custom coloured back and forward buttons and so on. Sites can also have custom JumpList items, icon overlays, and thumbnail buttons, as well as the ability to make the taskbar button flash using a combination of meta tags and JavaScript. This works well with Facebook. Whenever there is a notification, Facebook adds a red asterisk-like overlay on the taskbar icon, which allows you to keep an eye on it using only cursory attention. I’ll probably write up a tutorial on how to use these features in the future but since IE9 is still in beta I think it might be best to wait and see what happens further on in the development cycle.

Some simpler Windows 7 features are also present, such as Aero Snap on tabs that you drag to edge of the screen.

Conclusion

As always, it’s important to note that when we’re dealing with a beta, we’re dealing with an unfinished product so you have to keep in mind that anything can change before release (although my experience with Microsoft tends to be that feature-wise, their betas are almost identical to the final product in most cases). Having said that, overall I’m quite impressed with this release. I think Microsoft can say for the first time in a very long time that they are at least on the same level as their competitors in the web browser market. The new layout engine and renderer and infinitely better than what was available in previous manifestations of IE, both in terms of performance and features. The Windows 7 integration is very nice and makes for some interesting web applications in the future. The main thing I’m bothered with by this release is the overly simplified UI. It works, but it just doesn’t have the necessary power and flexibility that I think a web browser of today should have. I really, really, really want to see at least the option of moving those tabs back down to their own space. I’m eager to see a future build, as this is definately a step in the right direction for Microsoft.