Magento CE 1.8 vs. 1.9 – New Features & Difference Comparison

Magento released 1.9 update of community edition recently. In order to know what is the core difference between both editions. Below, we are presenting all features that remained under consideration during both updates: Note: You can read introduction to Magento CE 1.9 here. Download Magento 1.9 Compatible Extensions here.

Magento 1.8 C.E	Magento 1.9 C.E
The community edition update of Magento 1.8 concentrated on following areas:	The new 1.9 update of Magento community edition surrounds following enrichments:
Enhancement in Tax Calculation: The update of community edition reforms the precision of tax calculation for value added tax (VAT) along with reduction of rounding discrepancies in multiple taxes. The update handles the VAT & fixed product tax (FPT) so that merchandiser could access to credit memos and invoices contain precise and regular tax calculations and display of change in the calculation.The improvement in tax calculation also focuses on: VAT calculation problems in case of cross-border trade. VAT and FPT tax calculation problem in case of bundled products. Benefitting to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (W.E.E.E.) for tax recycling in the European Union.	Responsive Web Design: The 1.9 community update of Magento adopts responsive web design as a default template that empowers your clients by making process of establishment of responsive website easy. The responsive design particularly concentrates on users using mobile devices and websites. You can obtain responsive website in no time user friendly to tablet and Smartphone users, relinquishing the resources for other processes. Hence, it reduces the time required to market the domains. The default responsive layout in Magento C.E. 1.9 enables rapid growth of mobile merchandising domain and allows adaptation of new opportunities whose maintenance is cheap. The responsive element enables in achieving substantial benefits of search engine optimization and deploying approaches preferred by Google for mobile website optimization. The update for responsive theme incorporates following technologies: Sass/Compass: a CSS pre-compiler that ensures organizablity & reusability of CSS. jQuery: It is used for all custom coding through JavaScript in the responsive theme. jQuery uses innoConflict() function so it doesn't conflict with existing JavaScript library in Magento. The update includes additional JavaScript libraries in precise manner.
Functional Advancements: The previous update retains bug fixation of areas like shopping cart, checkout, CMS and functions involved in import & export of product.	Cross-Border Trade/ Price Consistency: Basic aim behind the inclusion of update is to add support for European merchants intend to maintain consistency in pricing for the clients, which are having different tax rates than store tax rate. Such regulation also enables retailers to capture multiple regions with uniform price to different customers based on geographical location. Along with this price does not include tax structures and amount of charges that vary from country to country.
Security Improvements: The 1.8 community update several modifications in security protocols, collected by using precise security assessment processes. Magento community edition was supported with precise internal testing & quarterly penetration testing conducted by professionals coordinating with the community developers to identify security risks to reduce vulnerability.Following security improvements were made: Enhanced password-hashing algorithm. Set on matters that may come up with Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) in Ecommerce domain. Set on possible problems in the issuance of Return Materials Authorizations (RMAs). Set on an issue related with session fixation when user signup in the web shop. Set on a cross-site scripting (XSS) matter reported in earlier community version of 1.8. Set on issues with the expiration of file-based user sessions. Set on problems that may involve Remote File Inclusion (RFI) vulnerabilities. The update got resolution of vulnerabilities in OAuth code. Fixation of possible loophole caused by accession to personal information as user views billing agreements. Resolution of security settings to protect user sessions in the favor of frontend cookies.	Security Improvements: Magento C.E. 1.9 has retains following security improvements: Fixation of vulnerability in possible cross-site scripting (XSS) during the creation of variants for configurable products. It includes fix for security lapse of displaying information about a different order to a customer. In case client uses PayPal as a default payment method for website, from now he cannot change his currency. Due to security issues, now update doesn’t include .swf file from Magento distribution. The update includes enriched and profound security for file system. The update improves the security of action URLs i.e. billing agreements. Reduces the security vulnerability through session fixation during checkout process. Improvisation of security protocols for Magento randomness function.
Performance Enhancements: For performance enhancement, update refined shopping experience was regularized by using fast page loading for checkout process. The performance indicators retained optimization of cache adapters for single server systems that reduces the number of pages needed to be cached, when product updates are refreshed. The performance of administrator control panel was also enhanced for large product and databases of order.Here is the general roundup for Magento community update 1.8: Reduction in the amount of searches in the large databases. The performance of checkout improvised through: Curtailing the unnecessary cleanups of RSS cache, in case of disability of RSS. In previous update, the locale used to deliver new order confirmation message, now it verifies either customer's locale matches the store's locale before attempting to localize the e-mail. Performance of overall checkout process was enhanced by means of loading current progress of checkout step. The update was configured to load large number of tax codes (35,000 or so) with no impact on performance.	Checkout Enhancements: Magento CE 1.9 introduces following enhancements in checkout process:The update undergoes Ajax web technology, it enables you to modify no. of items selected in shopping cart or abandon items without refreshing the page.‘Bill Me Later’ has now turned into a payment plan for checkout. In ‘Bill Me Later’, a client gets six month for the payment of dues, customer doesn’t get charged for extra charges, except standard PayPal transaction charges. ‘Bill Me Later’ service is offered by PayPal payment option, it is estimated that ‘Bill Me Later’ accelerates the sales nearly by 18% that is one-third of sales generated in the six months through normal cash payment.

This blog was created with FME's SEO-friendly blog