SillyDog701

[Antony]

Windows XP is pretty old now. It's had a good run, but It's in the process of being phased out very slowly. Microsoft reduced XP to extended support last year, that means that they'll still support it but only with security patches. Total support doesn't end until 2014 IIRC, giving the XP people plenty of time to migrate to something newer.

Well, I am still using Windows XP (under Parallels Desktop for Mac of course).

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

[beanboy89]

I've had a chance at playing around with the IE9 Platform Preview. It seems very buggy thus far. It has problems displaying some pages on first load, causing you to have to reload the pages a few times for it to finally display. I've had the program crash once thus far for a unknown issue.

I've run the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test in both IE8 and IE9 installed on the same computer, and IE9 scored significantly better than IE8. IE9 scored 3176.8ms, whereas IE8 scored 19556.6ms.

It's also worth noting that IE9's UserAgent string still identifies itself as IE8.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2pre) Gecko/20100212 SeaMonkey/2.1a1pre

[Don_HH2K]

I suppose the fact that it's buggy as hell is a good sign. If the IE9 preview is crashing on things that IE8 could handle fine, that would indicate that they're making substantial under-the-hood changes to the way the IE rendering engine works. The alternative would be where it only crashes when using new functionality, which would mean that they were just adding new features on top of their legacy code. Call to mind the old NGLayout demo.

On the other hand, the fact that they'd push prerelease software out the door at this early a stage seems almost like a last ditch effort to say, "Look, our browser is still competitive!" even though at this rate it's still far from it. Prealphas and nightlies work fine on the community-driven model, where an open group of end-users are doing bug testing, but is kindof pointless when the development process is going on behind closed doors.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100310 Minefield/3.7a3pre

[beanboy89]

It's worth noting that IE9 Platform Preview 3 was released last week, and the UserAgent string of IE9 finally identifies itself as a 5th generation browser. Trident is also identified as a version 5.0.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/5.0)