IE10 review: still disappointing for HTML5 games

https://www.scirra.com/blog/103/ie10-review-still-disappointing-for-html5-games

 

To be fair to IE 10, there's not a lot of HTML5 content out there yet to begin with. I've seen a handful of websites using it, and some games ((though in my own opinion, HTML5 games I've played thus far are rather crappy and performance is rough.)). Their particle test is a bit misleading as well, considering that has almost everything to do with what kind of hardware you're packing and not necessarily the browser. If you're packing a 400 dollar dedicated card, you're going to get nice performance regardless of browser.

 

That article is utter nonsense, FYI.

Their entire "performance" rant is based on WebGL, something IE doesn't even support, something that has nothing to do with HTML5 and something that has inherent security issues.
They complain about the lack of WebM support, yet Firefox has recently had to re-implement h.264 support because WebM is going nowhere. But this again has nothing to do with HTML5.

Microsoft has made a point of showing the power of IE9+ by advertising it alongside REAL HTML5 games like the Atari Arcade, Contre Jour, and Pirates Love Daisies. (Note the "additional IE9 effects" checkbox which used to cripple Chromes performance.)

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

Not only that, but IE hands down beats other browsers in performance when running these games (& HTML5 demos).

 

WebGL doesn't have inherent security issues. It has security issues because GPU acceleration has inherent security issues. Giving direct internet access to privileged components is a bad thing (Microsoft should know, given how ingrained IE used to be).

Firefox implementing h.264 has nothing to do with WebM and everything to do with Google's empty promise to drop it while maintaining h.264 for youtube. Had Google followed through (as they promised 15 versions ago) Firefox wouldn't have implemented it, they would have left it to Flash as they had for so long.

I think the article is drawing one thing, which you mention. IE is not supporting WebGL - IE is not supporting a lot of things, and we have to wait another two years for any progress. It's an incredibly dominant browser, when it refuses to progress the entire internet is held up despite the other browsers supporting these things.

The performance benchmarks are more to show how much faster native support will be as opposed to having to render via 2D compositioning (HTML and WebGL are both Javascript it's a matter of standards like OGL).

The article then brings up that Windows 8 apps run using IE10's engine. Again, here is where performance and features matter - we have to wait another 2 years before IE11 (hopefully) implements things that other browsers are supporting.

What I would take away from this is that the web moves fairly quickly and when a browser that holds between 20-60% of the browser market is playing catch up every two years people get held back.

I think IE10 is a big improvement in terms of security though. I'm not a web developer, I learned Javascript as a scripting language but never bothered with the DOM - from what I'm told IE isn't doing well compliance wise but that's a conversation I really can't speak to, just going by people who I trust to know better. And in terms of performance... serious improvements in IE10, but in every benchmark I've run it's been worse than Chrome (although in its own benchmarks it's about the same or slightly better, but I trust third party benchmarks much more).

In a conversation on IE security I'd be singing its praises. For this, not so much.