Dear Tim,

Please backport IE9 to Windows XP. My preciousss needs to run good on IE on XP, etc.

Thanks in advance,
Dave Woldrich
https://clubcompy.com/

Oh, yes of course, in the Java Control Panel. You make a good point on controlling this from the browser. I recall a long time ago there was an "Enable Java" checkbox in the Firefox control panel alongside "Enable JavaScript", which is where I was coming from on that. Looking in my Firefox options panel, I see that checkbox is now gone. So, you are right, times two! :)

Seeing as how average users cannot be trusted to take care of themselves, I think disabling the default for users' granting permissions to applets would be the only responsible thing for Oracle to do!

My first attempt at a commercial website, CardMeeting, is built around a large, unsigned applet. Those "Grant, Deny?" dialog boxes are poison to anyone in the know, and I surely would never visit any site with them. Unsigned applets don't need any security warning dialog because they are untrusted and therefore will receive no privileged access to the user's system. Unsigned == heavily sandboxed. "Unsigned" sounds like a bad thing though, so that's something I could never tout to my users. But in reality, I was looking out for them! :D

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get the CardMeeting applet jar packed up with scripts and making the applet "stream" data the way it does. Yeargh, I remember that pain. Anyhow, it makes me really sad that news like this may lead people to disable java applets; I think the unsigned form of applets is very powerful and much safer for average users than Flash ever was. I wish there was a way in the browser to disable only signed applets. Perhaps Oracle could bring the hammer down and go ahead and disable them by default in the next Java release.

My new website ClubCompy is 100% HTML+JavaScript. I wrote this whole simulated operating environment to teach kids to code with just the browser. I hope I don't start seeing people disable JavaScript on their browsers, then I'd be outta business!

Dave

if you have chromeframe installed, then club compy will take advantage of that

so detailed! Merry christmas, indeed!

ooh, that was not intentional, and is a bug. Very sorry, I honestly want IE9 to be great and was hoping to see scores for the new engine. I do not own windows 7 and msft refuses to backport to XP, so I haven't tested on ie9 beta. Again, sorry for the bug, didn't intend for there to be any bias.

hah! My wife's macbook does the same thing ever since we upgraded her to snow leopard. Thanks for the fun story. :)

thank you so much for the follow up, so cool that even the older ipod finished the tests!

completely agree, just want naive IE users to get a decent experience whenever they upgrade to the next version of windows. (windows 8 will be one of those rare win upgrades I will recommend to f&f when it comes out)

  I am displaying the standard "use at your own risk" message box when users launch the shell from the main site on IE and we detect there is no canvas tag support.

Those are some beautiful numbers! And that chrome score is monstrous! Thanks for testing iphone, I'm glad it woked

YES! Minimizing IE6-8 *DOES* improve performance, and I found that interesting as well.

My take is that IE is "close" to the kernel in a lot of ways, and so you get them turning off their blitter or whatever (even though the scene is still rendered in the offscreen buffer). IE really is a mix of very fast and very slow parts (mostly the JavaScript engine is the "slow".) You know, while I was developing that code, I found so many interesting ways to hack the code to squeeze out marginally better performance. IE8 is an odd egg, only slightly better than IE6 and 7, in my opinion. I'm praying IE9 will rock.

The code only maxes out one core at the moment, so your experience is in-line with what I see as well (I run while compiling and running the dev server with the box gettin' all swappy, and it runs okay even then).

I am simply floored it works at all. (I have a Palm Pre, and it's a no-go there.) This truly is a brave new world we're entering.

Darn. Well, I built IE support because I had to, not because I cared to. But that is really terrible how it behaved, sorry it didn't work well/at all. Sounds like Firefox and Chrome performed in-line with others though, so at least we got 2 out of 3. ;)

Well, just trying to give the kids a simple language to start with. The site is for everyone, but it's supposed to be something a kindergardener or first grader could be introduced to. I feel we have a moral responsibility to get kids trained on how to code and learn 'em on what computers can be made to do. And so, that's why we made ClubCompy.

That said, I completely concur with you. We have plans to add a sort of "byte code" VM behind the scenes that we could target with an assembler or with a higher level language compiler. That's my dream to see that happen, anyways. Big kids need to learn assembly once they get bored with our "Tasty" language. ;)