Inside the final Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview
- Wednesday, 04 August 2010 16:41
The fourth and final Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9 was released today, along with a raft of new HTML5 demos and tests. Though a full beta of the new browser is expected next month, Microsoft promised to release previews every eight weeks or so. With this new release, Redmond has kept its promise.
The message is still "the same markup": Internet Explorer 9 is a browser built for HTML5, and pages built to target Web standards will work properly—or, at least, degrade nicely.
As has been common throughout the preview period, Microsoft is touting the new browser's substantially improved performance, both relative to its predecessor and, thanks to its hardware acceleration, relative to other HTML5-capable browsers. The new version leapfrogs Safari 5 in the SunSpider benchmark, though still marginally trails behind Chrome 5 and 6, and Opera 10.60. Still, the mere fact that Internet Explorer 9 is competitive is a vast improvement.
