Microsoft offers a second preview version of its platform for Internet Explorer 9.
After first publication in mid-March 2010, Microsoft had promised the publication of a new trial version of Internet Explorer 9 every eight weeks. Wednesday is thus a second draft of IE9 which was posted. This rate of publication will be maintained until the publication of a true beta IE9.
The so-called preview of IE9 platform indeed intended primarily for developers to test the new engine. This draft does not become the common user interface of IE or its functionalities to the end user must wait for the beta test of IE9.
Recall also that given the operation of thehardware acceleration via Direct2D, users of Windows XP are not entitled to IE9. The second preview for IE9 is available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users and Microsoft will offer new opportunities for demonstrations of what he called GPU-powered HTML5.
With HTML5, we do not find elsewhere technology for video playback natively (no plugin) videos with H.264 codec will be supported by only IE9. It was not until the next preview and third in eight weeks in order to test this implementation.
The test aims to show the work done by Microsoft in support of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), for CSS3 and other standards. Little surprise then that is this is not an end in itself posted by Microsoft, platform preview 2 of IE9 is progressing to Acid3 test (68/100 against 55/100 before and 20/100 for IE8).
On the speed of execution, JavaScript IE8 is leaving very far behind compared to its competitors, the engine code-named Chakra IE9 continues to bring the leaders on the SunSpider benchmark. This compiles JavaScript engine in the background and takes advantage of multicore processor architecture to perform its work in parallel to IE.
On SunSpider, IE9 Platform Preview 2 gets 473 ms (against 590 ms with the first preview). It remains behind Google Chrome 5.0 Beta (271 ms), Opera 10.52 (294 ms) and Safari 4.0.5 (412 ms), but before Firefox 3.6 (736 ms) or pre-alpha 5 of Firefox 3.7 (645 ms). IE8 showed him 3746 ms …
For Microsoft, it should not be too soon to release version 9 of Internet Explorer, while the market share of IE continues to fall.
