IE9 May Actually Be a Fantastic Browser
Today, as part of MIX 2010, some exciting updates were released on the progress of Internet Explorer 9. The IE team is implementing some incredible features, such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG support, and a new lightning fast JavaScript engine, Chakra! Further, they’re currently scoring a 55 on the Acid3 test – a figure that’s surely to increase substantially before the official release. What about the idea of Microsoft contributing to an open source project, jQuery, with their proposed templating engine? Within moments of these announcements, the Twitter-verse spilled “tears of joy.”
Want to dive in and check out the developer preview? That’s available too, starting today!
Take IE9 for a Test Drive.
Finally, we announced the availability of the first IE Platform Preview for developers, and our commitment to update it approximately every eight weeks. We want the developer community to have an earlier hands-on experience with the progress we’re making on the IE platform. The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases.
IE Blog
Demos
Check out some of the demos below in each browser to learn the unique code required for each.
New JavaScript Engine: Chakra
“You’ll notice that IE9 is faster at this benchmark than IE8 and several other browsers. It’s interesting to note that the difference between today’s IE9 preview and the browsers to its right in this graph. It takes about 70 seconds to identify a 300ms difference between browsers.”
IE Blog
Miscellaneous Tweets about IE9 from MIX 2010
“Video tag and SVG support in IE 9 as well – and it’s crazy fast. Very impressed.”
John Resig
“Microsoft to Expand its Collaboration with the jQuery Community”: http://bit.ly/cxybri
@jQuery
“Today makes me very happy to have come to work at Microsoft. Very excited right now to see the reactions of the community.”
Rey Bango
“They’re asking for help in getting ppl to move IE6 to IE8. They want users on modern browsers.”
Rey Bango
“Open source, open standards, open Microsoft. Today I woke up to a different world than I thought I was living in.”
Molly E. Holzschlag
“So what we have here is HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 in IE9. If I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t freakin’ believe it.”
Molly E. Holzschlag
Check back for more details as they become available!