At the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft signaled its intent
to remain a contender in the Web browser battle by announcing the
availability of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview.
Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at
Microsoft, characterized IE9 as "the first browser to take standard
Web patterns that developers use and run them better on modern PCs
through Windows."
By "better," Hachamovitch means that IE9 supports Web standards and
is fast. IE9 supports many new elements in HTML5, the evolving
next-generation standard for Web pages, including CSS3, Scalable
Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and tags for H.264/MPEG4 and
MP3/AAC codecs. Mozilla fans will note the absence of Ogg Vorbis
and Ogg Theora support.
IE9 also includes support for hardware-acceleration, to hasten the
rendering of graphics and text.
"IE9 is the first browser to provide fully hardware-accelerated SVG
support," said Hachamovitch in a blog post. "The IE9 developer
tools support SVG as well, and we are excited to see what
developers build on top of modern hardware with a platform that has
great performance and internal consistency."
IE9 features a new JavaScript engine called "Chakra" that puts the
preliminary version of IE9 ahead of Mozilla Firefox 3.6 in a WebKit
SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test and just behind Apple Safari
4.05, Google Chrome 4 and 5, and Opera 10.5.
Perhaps most noteworthy, IE9 performs about six times faster than
IE8 on this test.
IE9 scored a 55/100 on the Acid3 test, which evaluates Web page
standards compliance. Firefox 3.6 scored 92/100. But Hachamovitch
insists IE9's score will improve as it moves toward general
release.
Microsoft also committed to contributing to the ongoing development
of the jQuery JavaScript Library and to jQuery interoperability
with ASP.NET in order to improve the development process for Web
applications. And it released SDKs for the Open Data Protocol
(OData), a data portability protocol based on HTTP and Atom that
facilitates the exchange of data between .NET, Java, PHP,
Objective-C, and JavaScript.
For Microsoft, IE9 has to be a hit. The company's overall share of
the browser market, which includes Internet Explorer versions 6
through 8, has been declining more or less steadily for years. This
has been due to security problems, particularly in IE6 and IE7, and
failure to keep pace with the competition.
In February, Microsoft had 61.58 percent of the global browser
market, according to NetApplications, down from about 80 percent
two years ago.
In a blog post last November, when details about IE9 had yet to be
released, Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development,
predicted that Microsoft would surprise everyone with the
seriousness of its effort to restore its credibility in the browser
race.
"Microsoft dug a huge hole when it mostly abandoned IE 6 and the
Web from 2001 until 2006," he wrote. "Their early efforts at
ramping back up with IE 7 were a big disappointment to most Web
developers and while their efforts with IE 8 were much better,
they're still at least a full generation behind the modern
browsers."
The generation gap however appears to be closing rapidly. In a
follow-up post on Tuesday, he wrote, "Welcome back, Microsoft!"