Internet Explorer 9 Unveiled!
Internet Explorer 9 has officially been unveiled today at the annually-held Professional Developers Conference (PDC). In fact, as this article is being published here, attendants and speakers on the PDC conference are still talking about IE9 and other tech advances. You can check out the discussions yourself at the Microsoft’s PDC2009 website.
We all know what Microsoft should do with IE9, and apparently their goals with IE9 is pretty much the same as we are since they are pretty obviously heading into the right direction. From the graphs shown in their presentation during the PDC, IE9 is depicted as faster, with more standards-compliant website rendering. The test is based on Webkit.org’s SunSpider test, a browser testing site very commonly used for benchmarking browser performance. For a browser which is barely three weeks into development, that is really some achievement.
According to them, they’re also including ‘hardware accelerated’ rendering using Direct Write and Direct 2D, along with users’ graphics card with the aid of DirectX D2D technology. This means that whether you’re trying to do CSS3, Javascript or DHTML, IE9 should render things much faster. Stephen Sinofsky mentioned that one particularly impressive rendering showed how with the existing browser, Bing Maps could render a map at about 13-14 frames per second; but using hardware acceleration, it was running at 60 frames per second. We’re talking about a new browser which performance is tripling its predecessors!
In other words, Internet Explorer 9 will be the first-ever browser to utilize both hardware and software to render its performance. So long your PC’s graphic cards are high-end, you can literally expect IE9 to fly. Sweet, isn’t it (pray that it wouldn’t come out as a disappointment, though)?
As mentioned that IE9 is only three weeks old, we shouldn’t be expecting its launch in the near future but then as Sinofsky mentioned, there’s still lots of works to do. I think most of us would pretty much be willing to wait for Sinofsky’s team to fully develop the new browser, wouldn’t we?