What's New in Internet Explorer 9

Like many web developers who started working in the mid 90’s I grew up on IE. I hated it with 3, loved it at 4, and even thought IE6 was pretty good in 2001. But I dumped the regular use of IE in 2003 with the release of Firefox.  Back then it was a trust / CSS thing, and as time went on there were just fewer and fewer reasons for me to return to IE. In the past few years, it’s been brutal for IE, and as the saying goes “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”  Here’s a trend of the browsers over the last couple of years:

( source W3C ) 

Recently, Microsoft released a stand-alone version of Internet Explorer 9 Preview.  Just so you know, I’ve decided to check this for you – and yes…you can install IE9 preview on your computer along with your current version of IE8 (can’t speak for IE7 users).  Here’s the proof:

The engineers at MS want you to know that morale must be improving, because the feature and performance enhancements if they are to be believed - are quite impressive.  Here are a few on my list that dazzled me: 

Massive CSS3 selector compatibility

Improved javascript performance

 A slew of HTML5 capabilities

And Hardware Acceleration (video is in Silverlight)

Take this video with a grain of salt, as it comes from the MS site and the caveat here is that only Safari and IE9 preview currently have hardware acceleration, Safari’s option turned off by default.  Still, the demo’s are pretty impressive.

Lastly, not all users are going to have access to the browser, as Microsoft plans the release towards Windows 7 users and up.

Comments

[asics shoes]

Take this video with a grain of salt, as it comes from the MS site and the caveat here is that only Safari and IE9 preview currently have hardware acceleration, Safari’s option turned off by default. Still, the demo’s are pretty impressive.