Internet Explorer 9 Beta1 has just been released for download

To summarize: WOW!

Performance & standards

IE9 is quick. Not just a bit quicker than IE7/8. I mean “Holy cow, Batman, you just shredded the tires on the Batmobile” quick. It is as quick as IE7 is not.

I’ve been testing the tech previews of the new IE9 rendering and Javascript engines for a while now and have been much impressed with the sheer raw speed, quality, stability and power.

IE7 and IE8 were both good releases that focused on users’ safety and security, stability, but they only made minor improvements to IE’s performance and standards compliance. And all the while, Firefox, Chrome and Safari continued to make rapid progress in making their browsers markedly faster and more standards compliant.

However, it looks like with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft might not just have caught up with the competition, but it might actually leapfrog them!

I’ve been testing the tech previews of the new IE9 rendering and Javascript engines for a while now. I have been mightily impressed with how jaw-droppingly quick IE9’s rendering is. But perhaps even more important is IE9’s enormous improvements in standards compliance. Make no mistake – not only is IE9 now blindingly fast, but it is now a leader in support of web standards.

But a tech preview of the rendering & script execution capabilities of a new browser are only part of the story: The browser’s user interface and features are just as important.

As Ed Bott said – I’ll leave it to others with the time and tools to generate the inevitable perf comparisons, but I can honestly state that IE9’s performance surprised me - in my testing, IE9 is easily as fast as Chrome and markedly faster than Chrome, Firefox or Safari on graphically-intensive sites.

Less is more - the new IE9 User Experience

Let’s face it, IE has been looking a little tired and dated ever since Google out-Apple’d Apple and released Chrome with its minimalistic … well … “chrome”. Out went the toolbars, search boxes and UI gadgets and in came the single combined address & search box:

Here’s IE9: You have to squint to see the difference between Google (above) and IE9 (below)!

I love the fact that Microsoft appear to be following Google’s lead and reducing the IE shell to the minimum “chrome” necessary for most users. Many of IE’s traditional features are still there if you want to turn them on, but Microsoft is opting for simplicity and cleanliness by default.

Features

IE9 is also littered with a number of important features that I encourage you to explore:

Tear-off Tabs

Navigate to a page. Any page. Now open another page in a different tab. Now open a new tab, go to YouTube and play a video. Decide that you want to watch the video while you’re reading one of your other pages.

Now click the YouTube tab and drag it off to a different portion of your screen (or different screen if you have more than one monitor). Notice that your page drags smoothly, the video continues uninterrupted and doesn’t miss a beat.

Zoom

It still amazes me how few people know how to do this: Open a page. Any page. Now press and hold your CTRL key while you scroll your mouse wheel backwards and forwards. Notice that your page zooms smoothly in and out, all elements remain where they should be. All text renders properly …

… even when you zoom all the way in:

Look at how clean that text is even zoomed in THAT far!

Aside: Hey, Amazon, you DO know that you don’t need to use bitmaps for your headings, right? I mean, the <hn> tags are there for a reason, render more cleanly and require less bandwidth for you and your customers. Just sayin’

Internet Explorer 8 introduced full-page zoom, but it didn’t work as well as this, many controls didn’t render properly when you zoomed in, etc. It’s flawless in IE9

Site Pinning

Storing and managing browser Favorites can be a real pain. Over time you just end up collecting a huge catalog of links which, if you’re anything like me, you often forget about and rarely use. I tend to use a small number of sites very frequently. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pin your favorite sites to your Task Bar? Now you can:

Open a page. Click and drag the page’s icon in the left of the address bar …

… and drop it into your taskbar:

Now your pinned website will appear in its own icon on your taskbar …

… and IE9 will reopen your new pinned web page in its own IE9 browser window color coded to the primary color of your pinned site’s icon – red in this case:

If you’re a site owner, you can add metadata to your site that IE9 uses to not only name your site and its hover-over tooltip, but also provides you a way to specify any number of site-specific “tasks” that appear as shortcuts in your pinned site’s context window (right click on your pinned site):

 

Further Reading

If you’d like to delve further, I can recommend reading the following:

User Experiences: Site-Centric Browsing on Windows

IE9’s Page Content Hardware Acceleration

Putting sites at the center of the browsing experience

For some great in-depth reviews of IE9, go see what Ed Bott @ ZDNet, Joanna Stern @ Engadget and Paul Thurrott have to say about IE9 Beta1.

This is only Beta1. Can’t wait to see how

Post Feedback

Post feedback on what you think of IE9 so far. Do you like it? Do you think MS have simplified IE9 too much? Is IE9 fast enough for you? If not – where is IE9 too slow?

An important and particularly compelling part of the Windows Phone user experience are the services Microsoft includes within Windows Phone 7:

 

 

• XBox Live (online gaming and entertainment)
• Zune (music and video subscriptions & purchases)
• Windows Phone Marketplace (try and buy applications for Windows Phone)

 

These services are key differentiators for Windows Phone 7 users - especially XBox Live and Zune - but they bring with them several issues:

Content Distribution Rights

Key among the issues that Microsoft faces are they legalities affecting Microsoft’s ability to offer content (music, games and videos) from various 3rd party content owners (i.e. TV & movie publishers, music labels, games publishers, etc.) to people in different parts of the world.

Make no mistake – this is a minefield.

For example, like Apple’s iTunes service, Microsoft’s Zune music service allows you to buy tracks and albums that you can listen to on your phone, PC, etc.

However, unlike Apple’s iTunes, Microsoft’s Zune allows you to pay a flat fee per month ($15 here in the US) for the right to download and enjoy as much music as you like.

As a Zune customer of many years, I cannot even begin to express just how extraordinarily compelling subscription music is! Not only does this save me AT LEAST $50-$70 per year (vs. the number of CD’s I used to purchase), I am free to explore a MUCH wider spectrum of music than I was able to afford before.

Not only is this a compelling service, but for my $15 per month, I also get to download up to 10 (ten) tracks per month DRM-free for me to keep. Therefore, I pay the equivalent of one CD per month and get to keep a CD’s worth of music from whichever band/album I like, AND I get to listen to as many other albums I want as well.

What’s not to like?

BUT … and this is a big but … The content owners get to decide what content they want to offer for subscription and where in the world Microsoft is permitted to rent their content.

Censorship shmenshorship!

Oh … and let’s not forget the issues of content censorship.

In some parts of the world, freedom is something granted by the state (government, ruler, ruling party, etc.). In many parts of the world, consumers choice is constrained by censorship rules defined by the state. Music containing profanity or expressing views the state disagrees with are banned or dubbed. Movies containing non-approved subject-matter, imagery, scenes or dialog are often edited, dubbed or banned. Games that are deemed too violent are only to be sold to users over a certain age (different ages in different countries) or banned outright.

And these rules and regulations change. Frequently.

Remaining compliant with the laws, rules and regulations of each country in which one operates content delivery services such as Zune and XBox Live is a major headache. And this headache is compounded by the issues of content distribution rights discussed above.

Pity the lawyers (yes … seriously!)

One can only imagine the analysis, planning and negotiations that must ensue to allow Microsoft to deployment Zune XBox Live internationally. Armies of lawyers working with legions of program & project managers, developers, testers, translators and other specialists must be employed to work-through these issues. And these are not simple issues to solve.

Considering the above (and my previous post on globalizing Metro), one can understand, if not accept, why Microsoft had to choose to selectively roll-out its services for Windows Phone 7.

If you’re a fan of what Microsoft is building, it sucks to be in a not-currently-supported part of the world, but I am certain that if the market is sufficient in size and the economies work-out, Microsoft will eventually roll out the online services for Windows Phone (and Windows itself) in your region of the world.

Engadget has just posted a piece on how Microsoft is “only” releasing Windows Phone 7 in five languages and how they’re omitting and/or limiting XBox Live, Zune and Windows Phone Marketplace for other languages (at least for now).

I’ll discuss the challenges Microsoft faces with the global rollout of its XBox Live and Zune services for Windows Phone 7 in a later post.

In this post I’ll discuss the challenges of globalizing the Windows Phone 7 user experience:

Global Text layout 101

Most printed text today is flowed horizontally across the page/screen, from top to bottom.

This is true for most Alphabetical writing systems such as Latin-based languages (e.g. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek) where text is read left to right, from top to bottom (LRTB):

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew flow text right to left (RLTB):

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

Although many (primarily East-Asian) Logographic languages have a long tradition of flowing text vertically (e.g. Chinese, Korean), most modern dialects of these languages primarily print the majority of their text horizontally left to right, from top to bottom (LRTB):

However, some languages continue to flow text vertically for more traditional or formal documents, signage, envelope addresses, business cards, etc.

Other languages, such as some used in the Philippines, are read from the bottom of the page upwards.

How does this affect the Windows Phone 7 User Experience?

For the Windows Phone 7 user experience (called “Metro”), Microsoft drew inspiration from the primarily textual themes, adorned with simple iconography, that we’re exposed to daily in our every-day life:

Text is used throughout the Metro experience to not only describe each activity, operation and page. In Windows Phone 7, application experiences expose a horizontal panorama between multiple “pages” of a given experience:

Within a given panoramic “page”, one sees the edge of the text and items on the page to the left or right, visually indicating to the user that there’s more to see if one wipes one’s finger to the right or left:

Note also that the title of the current “page” often exceeds the width of the page to indicate there’s more room on the right, encouraging users to pan horizontally.

While this is a fresh, compelling and highly engaging user experience, it offers obvious challenges when it comes to globalizing the Windows Phone experience. How will this user experience handle right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew? How will the user experiences support Logographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese? What happens when you run a French (LR) application on an Arabic (RL) Windows Phone?

Microsoft’s decision

Rather than trying to solve these problems prior to the launch of Windows Phone7, Microsoft is choosing to support Latin-based LRTB languages at launch. Support for other languages will be delivered incrementally in subsequent updates.

I applaud Microsoft for NOT trying to boil the ocean: It’s not yet clear how the challenges of globalizing the Windows Phone 7 user experience are to be solved. Why make the rest of the market wait until they have solved all these problems? Doing so would be crazy!

Microsoft is doing the right thing in releasing Windows Phone 7 for Latin-based languages first and adding support for other languages later. It may be frustrating to those interested in Windows Phone 7’s “Metro” user experience who will not see local language support at RTM, but an incremental approach and product rollout is the best approach Microsoft could take.

If you feel strongly that you want Microsoft to support your language, be sure to contact your local Microsoft subsidiary and make your voice heard. Contrary to commonly expressed opinion, the company DOES listen!

Congratulations to the Windows Phone extended team. Terry Myerson has just announced that Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing (RTM). This means that the final bits have been released to hardware partners and to those lucky enough to receive development hardware. In just a few short weeks, we’ll see the retail launch of a number of new Windows Phone devices with more to come in the coming months too.

Interestingly, those who’ve been playing with early betas of Windows Phone almost unanimously commented on the need to better separate Facebook “friends” from people you actually care about communicating with. The Windows Phone team appear to have taken this feedback on-board and have improved the Windows Phone Facebook integration to allow you to filter your contacts to include only the people you really do want to keep as contacts.

Kudos to the team for taking this feedback on board and improving the product accordingly.

Can’t wait to rush out and get my handset. Only problem is going to be choosing which one!?