IE9 Announced at Mix 2010

Although Microsoft is the last developer to take advantage of the new HTML5 platform and is truly playing catchup with Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Safari et cetera, it is significant that it announced this advancement at Mix 2010 this week. This is despite the fact that it will live Windows XP users in the lurch and that it’s features are right on target with the other browsers’ development and one of its features actually surpasses the others.

Here is how Microsoft described its presentation in its IEBlog:(to read the rest go to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/16/html5-hardware-accelerated-first-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers:

When we started looking deeply at HTML5, we saw that it will enable a new class of applications. These applications will stress the browser runtime and underlying hardware in ways today’s websites don’t. We quickly realized that doing HTML5 right – our intent from the start – is more about designing our browser’s subsystems around what these new applications will need than it is about a particular set of features. From the beginning, we approached IE9 with the goal of enabling professional-grade, modern HTML5 support on top of modern hardware through Windows.At the MIX conference today, we demonstrated how the standard web patterns that developers already know and use broadly run better by taking advantage of PC hardware through IE9 on Windows. This blog post provides an overview of what we showed today, across performance, standards, hardware-accelerated HTML5 graphics, and the availability of the IE9 Platform Preview for developers.First, we showed IE9’s new script engine, internally known as “Chakra,” and the progress we’ve made on an industry benchmark for JavaScript performance. With the differences between script engines on benchmarks approaching the duration of an eye-blink, we described our approach for making real-world sites faster. Chakra compiles JavaScript in the background on a separate core of the CPU, parallel to IE.We showed our progress in making the same standards-based HTML, script, and formatting markup work across different browsers. We shared the data and framework that informed our approach, and demonstrated better support for several standards: HTML5, DOM, and CSS3. We showed IE9’s latest Acid3 score 55; as we make progress on the industry goal of having the same markup that developers actually use working across browsers, our Acid3 score will continue to go up. As part of our commitment to the standards process, we submitted test cases to the standards bodies. We also made these tests available for everyone to try in any browser.In several demonstrations, we showed the significant performance gains that graphically rich, interactive web pages enjoy when a browser takes full advantage of the PC’s hardware capabilities through the operating system. The same HTML, script, and CSS markup work across several different browsers; the pages just run significantly faster in IE9 because of hardware-accelerated graphics. IE9 is also the first browser to provide hardware-accelerated SVG support.Finally, we announced the availability of the first IE Platform Preview for developers, and our commitment to update it approximately every eight weeks. We want the developer community to have an earlier hands-on experience with the progress we’re making on the IE platform. The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases.

The major components of IE9 which tend to match those of other browser development include:

• h.264 video: This is HTML5’s Flash Killer. Some video sites  like YouTube have been experimenting video that does not require a plugin to play. h.264 is the new format standard and IE9 will have it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they’re drawn as vectors, not plain images.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer’s various CSS compatibilities have beenless than stellar compared to the others’. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3 and will hopefully be closer to par when it launches.

The New JavaScript Engine

The speed of JavaScript rendering is the measurement  that new browsers are held by. Here’s how Microsoft says IE9 measures up right now:

IE9 is close but no cigar but it is faster than IE8. In the demo, IE9 barely passed the  the Acid3 test, scoring a mediocre 55/100, which they say they plan  to improve.

Now here is the standard which IE9 appears to own:

2D Accelleration:

IE9 adds DirectX video acceleration for SVG graphics and even text rendering,  which makes the entire browsing process a bit smoother.

As demonstrated on the Mix stage, HTML5 video rendering is much, much smoother than in Chrome , simply because of Direct2D video rendering—Microsoft was able to demonstrate two 720p HD videos playing smoothly in the same browser window, while Chrome had trouble with only one.

In HTML5 some of the Javascript rendering can also be offloaded to the GPU, which will help speed up rendering.

Now, of course, no release date has been set for IE9 but it is nice to see that Microsoft is finally showing some progress in the development of CSS, HTML5  and is trying to catch up to the other developers in this area.

Try it

If you are game, you can actually try out IE9 right now.   The interface is still extremely basic and of course there is no HTML5 video capability as of yet. There is not even a menu bar yet. Remember you can not test this out on XP. The download’s available here.