Internet Explorer 9
With constant innovation being the watchword in the Web browser market, Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 9 and has released a preview of its new browser.
The company says that IE9’s speed and much improved support for HTML5 are among the browser’s best features. HTML5 support, in particular, is an important capability for any modern Web browser as it underpins a number of key developments in font control, native multimedia playing and geotagging capabilities.
The preview of Internet Explorer 9 is not yet a fully functioning browser so is not yet a replacement for current browsers, but is designed to display some of its new capabilities. The current preview version is a long way from being a complete browser: There’s no Back button, for example, nor bookmark manager, history feature, or toolbars. Microsoft says it plans to release a new preview version every eight weeks.
One thing that is known is that Internet Explorer 9 won’t work on Windows XP. Users will have to have Windows Vista or Windows 7, with Vista fully updated to the most recent version to be able to run IE9.
Speed-wise Microsoft says that IE9 is significantly faster than IE8.
Microsoft’s own tests suggest that the IE9 preview is around 70% faster than IE8. This doesn’t mean it is as fast as Opera 10.5 or Chrome 4 or 5 but it does start to put it in the same category. It also beats Firefox 3.6 and 3.7, the second most popular web browser.
Right now IE8 is by far the slowest browser available but with its new script engine, known as ‘Chakra’, IE9 compiles JavaScript in the background on a separate core of the CPU. This gives it a significant speed boost.
Aside from Javascript improvements, IE9 will also include hardware-accelerated SVG support, which means significantly faster rendering of services such as Bing and Google Maps and other graphics-intensive applications. SVG support also caters for animated graphics and even SVG-based games. Browsers such as Firefox already include some of these capabilities in their current releases.
A significant portion of IE9 is built to support the new range of HTML5 capabilities. These include native video and audio support. The IE9 platform doesn’t yet include these features but Microsoft says it will in future releases.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) << discussion
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