IE9 Preview

[NathanE]

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

Highlights:
- Background compilation of JavaScript
- HTML5 support
- GPU-accelerated rendering

Download now, folks

 

[NathanE]

RE: Use of IE6. The Government are actively refusing to upgrade past IE6. My girlfriend works in one of the (many) departments Labour have created, and IE6 is all they are allowed.

The IT managers of these departments need to be sacked.

 

[NathanE]

Could they not have integrated this into IE8, the numbers are already adding barriers to things for existing users.

IE6 needs to be totally killed, IE7 killed soon after - Why provide support for legacy versions when you're 2-3 ahead of it? Hopefully this'll be a nice addition to the line though, IE8 was decent.

It is a major release It would be very difficult to somehow integrate these level of features into IE8.

 

[NathanE]

Kinda disappointed. The perfect CSS3 support is encouraging, but I was expecting Microsoft to really go for this and show something which passed Acid3 and beat out Chrome and Opera in SunSpider. 55/100 is well behind every other browser. The JS performance is a nice improvement, but it's well behind Chrome/Safari/Opera, and Firefox has big changes coming up which will jump it ahead of IE9 before it's released. Microsoft's resources must dwarf those of Opera, and they're only developing for one platform... surely they should be able to find comparable performance?

[edit] What's interesting is that they're supporting HTML5 <video> with H264. So do Chrome and Safari, which puts pressure on Mozilla.

Supporting Acid3 is not possible today. Not without breaking standards compliance anyway.

 

[NathanE]

I thought that was the whole point of compatibility mode, to allow them to provide a standards compliant browser while not breaking the web?

Dunno. My point was that Acid3 tests various HTML5 and CSS3 features which are still in draft form, i.e. not yet standards.