Microsoft’s Plan for Internet Explorer 9

This month is the 15th anniversary of the release of Internet Explorer, actually it was released at midnight on August 13th 1996. Since then, it has been a long journey especially in the war of browsers like with Firefox and Chrome. But now, Microsoft plans to launch the beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta browser on Sept. 15, 2010.

Microsoft HQ, Redmond is counting on IE9 to get it back in to serious technical competition with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. This IE 9 Beta needs either Windows Vista or Windows 7 (no XP).

People would eagerly wait for the new promises that Microsoft brings with their latest Internet Explorer Browser 9.

Now is the time to start getting their sites ready for Internet Explorer 9 Beta. What are the key new things?

• Internet Explorer 9 would help enable the same markup to work across browsers
• Internet Explorer 9 would be all-round fast
• Through Windows and modern hardware, Internet Explorer 9 would unlock the next class of experiences for the web
• Enabling the same markup to work across browsers
• Delivering all-round performance
• Through Windows and modern hardware, unlocking the next class of experiences for the web with hardware acceleration

The software giant few months back released another platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the form of IE9 Preview 2 and this latest incarnation scores 68 out of 100 on the Acid3 test.  The latest build also claims to improve JavaScript and HTML5 performance while the full hardware acceleration for HTML5 on IE9 is able to take the workload off your computer’s processor, shifting it to the graphics chipset.

Credit Net Apps

Developers and partners have been excited to experience the new IE9 web development and design capabilities, including fully hardware accelerating all graphics and text through Windows, the new Chakra JavaScript engine, as well as the support for modern standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM.Interestingly, we saw coverage about Internet Explorer posting a worldwide gain in usage share. That encouraging news continues today with Net Applications’ release of their July usage share numbers.

Net Applications reports overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July, while Firefox lost 0.90% share and Chrome dipped 0.08% in share. Most interesting is the fact that Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the fastest growing browser with a 0.98% increase worldwide in July – and now represents more than 30% of browser usage worldwide.

Rightly they say “The future is cloud” … and now we are seeing that everyone is using someway part or full of “Cloud Computing”. As you can find the detailed reading on Cloud Computing in another post, hence I am trying to give some more thoughts around one of the vendor service offerings on Cloud Computing from Amazon. They have bundled their cloud computing services under ‘Amazon Web Services’ (AWS).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a pioneer ‘cloud computing’ based company providing different kinds of remote computing services over the web. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage service (S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce are to name few of them. Let’s have a quick overview on what these services are all about:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):

It provides resizable computing resources, all available in the cloud. By subscribing to Elastic Compute Cloud a user can create a virtual machine (an instance), which is nothing but an outline of a machine.

You can configure the instance based on the Operating system, applications, libraries, data, security and network access, etc you want to use.

The advantages:

• Elastic: The capacity of the server instance can be increased or decreased with in no time and you have the liberty to create as many instances as you want at the same time.
• Complete Control: You will have root access of the instances and have full control over it.
• Secure and Reliable: This service runs on a highly reliable and secured computing environment. Web Service interfaces are available to configure firewall settings.
• Economical: In line with advantages of cloud computing, for EC2 also you pay for only what you use and the kind of instance you create.

The Pricing:

The pricing depends on the time of usage and the kind of instance created.  Let’s see how:

• On-Demand Instance: The pricing for this instance is based on per instance-hour consumed, starting from the time when instance is launched until it is terminated.
• Reserved Instances: Reserved Instances can be purchased for the period of 1-3 years and pay a non-refundable fee only once. You get a discount on the usage charge i.e. the rate applicable when the instance is running.
• Spot Instances: Spot instances are the unused EC2 capacity whose charge is decided on the supply of and demand for Spot Instances.

The cloud computing area is still under the evolution and the changing scenario is very dynamic, so watch out for the happenings around this. I will keep you posted on that, so keep updating!

Benefits of using Windows Azure:

In simple words, Azure benefits the developers, Independent Software Vendors, Business Partners and any Third parties with their solutions.

Infrastructure Management made Simple: Since services platform manages many critical OS updates and management tasks, more focus can be put for the needs of the users. Also, eliminating the expensive hardware planning and management.

For the Developers: Millions of .Net developers, can utilize their skills to create cloud-based applications that are scalable across on-premises and online. In future, applications written on Ruby on Rails (RoR),Python, Php can also be deployed.

Standards Compatibility: Since Azure platform supports all industry standard protocols like HTTP, SOAP, REST etc., applications can be easily integrated though built on different technologies.

Enhanced User Experiences: With Windows Azure a variety of applications can be developed for web, mobile and hybrid domain. These applications can also easily get integrated with existing or third-party applications.

Faster: Since the Azure platform is offering lot of services up-front, applications will be created and deployed faster than custom way.

Development Tools

• Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services
• Complete command-line SDK tools and samples
• Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging

source: microsoft.com

 Read Related: What is Windows Azure in Part 1

Windows Azure Platform

Microsoft’s first step into Cloud Computing is by providing cloud platform known as Windows Azure. It is a platform that provides with wide range of services for both internets as well as on-premise environment. In simple words, Windows Azure platform allows applications to be hosted, managed as well as to run at Microsoft datacenters.

The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called Fabric controller. Besides supporting Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages, Windows Azure platform welcomes third party languages as well such as Ruby, Python, PHP and Eclipse to usher in enhanced cloud-based computing capabilities. Additionally, the open architecture of Windows Azure platform enables developers to build web applications that will run on PCs, connected devices or servers, thus providing with best of hybrid solutions for both on-premises and online. The environment also supports multiple internet protocols such as HTTP, SOAP, XML and REST. It can also integrate well with Microsoft Visual Studio for development of Azure-based applications.

Windows Azure Platform includes following five services that the developers can use to run the applications in the cloud.

Live Services:
It is the building block for the developers to build rich social applications for larger section of population in web. Using the Live Services components, developers can build applications as well as mash up.

SQL Azure services:
It is the relational database that allows search, relational queries as well as data synchronization with remote offices and mobile devices. In simple words it offers data storage capabilities. This Microsoft SQL Azure can store as well as retrieve unstructured, semi-structured and structured data and information.

.Net services:
This service can be used to secure applications as well as for communication across all applications. One can create federated applications using Microsoft’s .Net services so that the applications can span from on-line premises to the cloud.

Sharepoint services & Dynamics CRM services:
These are the other two components which the developers will be using in the long run to build strong customer relationship. These two capabilities integrated in applications will enhance cloud-computing experience manifold.

Read also Azure Benefits … to complete the knowledge cycle. Keep reading!