Microsoft published a preview of the platform of Internet Explorer 9 in order to demonstrate its capabilities. It is aimed at developers but any Windows user (except XP) can be downloaded. It is not a trial version of Internet Explorer 9 and we can not surf the web.
With this preview, Microsoft confirmed several efforts to start by improving the speed of JavaScript execution with a new engine code-named Chakra. The JavaScript engine compiles in the background and takes advantage of multicore processor architecture to perform his current work in conjunction with IE.
The improvements are to rendezvous with IE9 that fills dramatically behind its competitors on the SunSpider benchmark. IE9 done and better than Firefox 3.6, but remains behind Safari 4.0.5, Google Chrome Opera 4.0 or 10.5.
Also for the better compliance with Web standards even if such IE9 is not yet able to pass the Acid3 test with a meter that hangs in 55/100 (IE8 displays 20/100). Still, Microsoft does not interest more than that to the test and confirmed in all cases its commitment to CSS3 or 5 with HTML in the preview several demonstrations available on specific implementations.
In this preview, there is no record of support for the video tag in HTML 5 (with the H.264 codec), but it probably will for the next, knowing that Microsoft will update its previews all eight weeks .
To speed up HTML rendering graphics and also with the new support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), IE9 operates the hardware acceleration. Microsoft is going to talk about GPU-powered HTML5 ". In this case, the preview uses Direct2D. Indeed, this excludes Windows XP and a priori including when IE9 will be available in a beta or final, which is not immediately.
