Internet Explorer 9 nears with release of final preview

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 August 2010 09:43

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft has released what it says will be the final preview build of Internet Explorer 9 before the new browser's beta release.

Microsoft is positioning Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) as a faster and more standards-compliant browser than its predecessor. IE9 is currently at the 'platform preview' stage, which means it is intended for developers rather than end users.

A key feature of IE9 platform preview build #4, which was released overnight, is fully hardware-accelerated HTML5 for text, graphics, audio and video. IE9 runs various Microsoft-provided HTML5 demos between twice and ten times faster than Firefox or Chrome.

It also incorporates 'modern' SVG, which allows the use of SVG in the delivery of animated as well as static graphics.

Other performance gains come from the integration of Microsoft's new 'Chakra' JavaScript engine with the rest of the browser. Previously, the JavaScript engine communicated with the browser via COM which, as Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch put it, "could cause performance problems."

The growing use of web applications makes browser performance an increasingly important issue.

What about standards compliance? See page 2.