Microsoft delivers a new preview version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9), the next major release of the company's dominant Web browser featuring support for the HTML Canvas tag and more.
Microsoft has delivered a new preview version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9),
the next major release of the company's dominant Web browser featuring support
for the HTML Canvas tag and more.
This release, known as IE 9 Platform Preview 3 (IE 9 PP3), is the third update
of Microsoft's IE 9 preview software since the company unveiled it at its MIX
2010 show in Las Vegas in March.
Microsoft pledged to deliver new releases of the IE 9 preview every eight weeks-this
one comes just seven weeks after the release of the second IE 9 Platform
Preview.
To date, Microsoft has seen over 2 million downloads of IE 9 Platform Preview
and 16 million views of the Test Drive
site.
And Microsoft has stuck to its goal of providing developers with the ability
to use the "same markup," improve performance of the browser and continue
to see it proliferate, said Rob Mauceri, Microsoft's principal group program
manager for Internet Explorer.
In an interview with eWEEK, Mauceri said Microsoft has delivered what
developers have asked for. Indeed, in addition to the HTML Canvas tag support,
Microsoft's IE team has delivered support for HTML5 <audio> and
<video> tags.
"IE 9 puts the power of the whole PC on the Web," Mauceri said. "Browsers
today use less than 10 percent of the PC's computing power, but Canvas and
HTML5 audio and video let you use all of the power of the PC." Microsoft
has a new demo with Amazon.com of a virtual bookstore experience that Mauceri
says demonstrates this.
Microsoft's investment in increasing the browser's performance has paid off,
Mauceri said. According to the SunSpider benchmark test, IE 9 PP3 surpasses
Chrome 4 and the current shipping version of Firefox, coming in at 347
milliseconds overall.
Additionally, Microsoft's continued focus on supporting various Web
standards has led to improved performance in standard tests. For instance,
Microsoft's IE team witnessed an increase in IE 9's Acid3 score from 68 to 83. "And
we're not done there yet, either," Mauceri said.
Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a Web
browser follows certain selected elements from Web standards, especially
relating to the Document Object Model (DOM)
and JavaScript.
Microsoft's move to deliver additional support for the ECMAScript 5
specification and the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Web Open Font Format
(WOFF) certainly had something to do with the improved Acid test scores.
ECMAScript 5 is the latest edition of the standard upon which JavaScript is
based.
Meanwhile, Microsoft added 15 new developer samples on the IE 9
Test Drive site, Mauceri said.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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