First Preview: Internet Explorer 9 : Better, Faster, Stronger?
By Mary Branscombe , published on November 19, 2009 at 7:10 PM
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Despite the rumors, Microsoft didn’t show off a public technical preview of Internet Explorer 9 this week, but it did show off a new test version of the new browser. The test version of IE 9 was shown at Microsoft’s professional developer conference yesterday and Tom’s Guide had a hands-on demonstration of the same features from Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team. There are no new features in this test version, just improvements to the rendering engine. To show that it’s a test version rather than a full new browser, the icon is a greyed-out version of the familiar IE logo. |
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Neat! Most of the improvements look like they could be ported to other browsers. The crisper font rendering and rounded boxes look sweet.
Chrome made my life a lot easier... no crashing, simple interface and lots of eye candy functions... am not going back even if it's faster than chrome.
am sure Firefox users won't either.
To show that it’s a test version rather than a full new browser, the icon is a greyed-out version of the familiar IE logo
And here I was just thinking IE felt a little gloomy and down today...
Hum did i not see something HTML5 support
DXVA and text smoothing is quite nice but skipping html5 is not allowed! down with Adobe's Flash that horrible little thing that is practically 99% used for annoying ads
Hum did i not see something HTML5 support DXVA and text smoothing is quite nice but skipping html5 is not allowed! down with Adobe's Flash that horrible little thing that is practically 99% used for annoying ads
And you think HTML5 won't be used for the same thing???
Be that as it may HTML5 might actually bring some good with it, without being an unreasonable drain on available hardware resources.
Haha, so speed-wise instead of being in fourth place by a long shot, they will be in fourth place just by a little bit
That's funny.
Well, I hope the smoother font might be something that I can look forward to.
Firefox developers have started applying the same rendering techniques for 3.7 (experimental builds are available), simply by adding a Direct2D Cairo backend (thus, all Cairo-based browsers may use it sooner or later), and they are now debugging it (it's functionally complete).
Firefox 3.7 (Minefield) already gets 96/100 on Acid3 (with html5 and SMIL activated), and has no more graphical glitches (some other browsers get higher scores, but don't match the reference rendering yet). This won't be backported to 3.6, which is already too advanced for such a patch.
Other platforms won't see the technology, because it's MS-only (but they have other equivalent technologies available).
A project to 'bottle' Firefox tabs has started too; for now, it's only the equivalent of spawning several Firefox processes in a single UI, but the goal is to dissociate the rendering threads, network stacks and UI process from each others.
What I'd really enjoy from IE 9: DOM 2 and SVG support.
Still will be a long way from standards-compliant so my sites will be just as hard to develop!
I don't believe there's such a thing as IE9 any more.
This demo is nothing but a bunch of pictures than anyone could throw together using PowerPoint.
Now if they would have made a download of the IE9 beta available to developers, like they promised, that would have been something. But they never did.