Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available

Yup it’s here!

On Monday, 14th the Automatic Update (AU) feature of Windows Update (WU) started to offer users of Internet Explorer 9 Beta an upgrade to the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate.

This rollout started with a narrow audience and expanded over the coming days to cover all Internet Explorer 9 Beta users. I’m late brining the news I know but I bet most of you just wait for the windows update system to offer the new updates to you as and when they go live, however if you go to http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9 you can grab your very own copy of the Release Candidate and get ahead of the rest!

As some of you know I design websites and need/like to keep up to date on the latest, Andy Zeigler, Program Manager has just announced (as I write this actually) another cool feature for IE9, it supports the W3C Geolocation API.

This is what he has said:

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IE9 RC includes support for the W3C Geolocation API, which enables Web developers to request the user’s physical location. This capability is useful for many Web sites, especially those that are already location-aware. For example, mapping services can now center the map based on where you actually are. Sites that let you check in can recommend nearby places. Local search can work more reliability.

Internet Explorer respects your privacy. With your permission, Web sites can obtain your approximate latitude and longitude by calling one of the W3C Geolocation API methods. If a Web site requests your location, Internet Explorer will notify you and let you choose whether or not to grant the requesting Web site access to your location. You can allow or deny the Web site access to your location once, or you can always allow or deny by clicking on the “Options for this site” button. At any time, you can clear the list of sites you have allowed or denied access to on the Privacy tab in Tools->Internet Options. On that tab, you can also turn off geolocation and prevent any Web site from requesting your location.

If you allow, Internet Explorer will approximate your location with the help of the Microsoft Location Service and works without the need for additional hardware. Given an IP address or a list of nearby WiFi hotspots, it can approximate your physical location using a database of IP addresses and a database of known hotspot locations.

You can try out this capability on the IE9 Test Drive site. Just click “locate me,” approve the prompt, and check out the result. If you zoom out, you can see the error radius that is returned by the API. You’ll notice that location requests with WiFi data are more accurate than those based just on IP address.

You can check out the Geolocation Demo on the IE Test Drive site.

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Why this is quite interesting is because a number of members here have suggested to me that a map type system of the members locations would be a great way to work out who lives closer to who and maybe arrange for a meet up, with support for geolocation I could maybe code up a plug-in for vBulletin that collects your location and maps it out on a Google map or something like that...just thinking out loud really.

Anyway, if you’re interested go grab the RC and let me know what you think of IE9.

Lee

Sounds good fella, should be interesting

Wow, that’s rapid!

I just installed it to my development pc and the first site I tired obviously was this one, it chewed it up and spat the site out like it was nothing.

I design/code mainly in Firefox and webkit browsers and then follow up with a troubleshooting session on IE normally and from what I’ve just seen IE9 is the fastest by eye at loading this site. I know things go a little deeper then how fast a page loads but so far so good, I will take a look and post back page load times for the top 4-5 browser. What I am seeing is pages take a split second to load but rather then load the page top to bottom the page is rendered instantly with no waiting around.

Lee

Hi Lee,

All interesting stuff but on the location front I would not want too specific a geographic location being posted on a members map. Especially as I post pictures of my machine on this site - just too much of an advert for the unscrupulous. The location in my profile is OK.

But good news on IE9 quicker page loading, I've had a few long loads recently.

Thanks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by routercnc

All interesting stuff but on the location front I would not want too specific a geographic location being posted on a members map.

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Yes that is how i feel about it as well, so i dont think it will happen.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by routercnc

But good news on IE9 quicker page loading, I've had a few long loads recently.

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Hopfully you will see this pick up speed when the new front end/design/website go's live, at the momment these pages pull data from outside/3rd party websites. With the new design i have condensed a few things down and will be hosting things locally. I know its a problem, i have seen page load times go up recently and also yesterday there was a delay in getting data served due to problems connecting to one of these 3rd party websites, pages seemed to freeze for a few seconds.

So it is quite a concern for me as the lead developer, i would ask that you "bare with me" on this for the momment as i am working as fast as i can.

Cheers,
Lee

vB4, which is the software this site runs on, is slow loading.
It's been the bain of my life since April. Compared with vB3, average page size has well over doubled, meaning even on fast internet connections, simple pages can take a couple of seconds to load, and if you've not got a fast computer, the huge amount of scripting and CSS can take a while for some browsers to load/interpret/display.

For example, this page needed 806KB of information to display. Which breaks down into 108KB of documents, 277KB of images, 291KB of scripting, and 114KB of CSS files.
A similar page in vB3 would be about 3-400KB.