NZ MSDN Flash 16 February 2011 published: Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate

The latest edition of NZ MSDN Flash is now available!

Editor: Mat Velloso

Welcome to this week’s MSDN Flash,

What a week we have just had!

With the news about our new partnership with Nokia, our improved market share and accuracy of Bing and the release of Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate in 40 languages, I can say we have many reasons to celebrate. I wonder what the Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices will look like… You can see all sorts of speculation about it on the web.

So, why bother installing a release candidate version of Internet Explorer 9? Performance has been improved significantly. With a focus on real world web sites rather than artificial performance benchmarks, and less memory consumption, there’s no way that you won’t notice the improvements – even from the IE9 beta. From how long it takes to open the browser, to how quickly a page is rendered, everything is much snappier.

You can now tune your JavaScript timer’s frequency as a setting under Windows Power Options, so you can tell the browser to require less power if you’re running on battery. What about CSS3 2D Transforms? HTML5 Geolocation? Yes, we’ve got both. Take a look at how well we are doing on the HTML 5 compliance tests. I can summarise the results – no other browser is even close to where we are today in terms of HTML 5 standards compliance.

What about IE’s user interface? Well, there are a few changes – the result of feedback from thousands of you. Right-click on a tab and you’ll see the option to “Show tabs on a separate row”. This will move the tabs below the address bar, giving you more space to see your open tabs. The download manager now displays the download speed, pinned sites now allow more than one homepage (so when you click on a pinned website, IE opens a group of several tabs already set to different addresses) and if you copy a URL, go to IE and hit Control-Shift-L, it will know what to do and navigate to that address from the clipboard. Oh, and the currently active tab is now much easier to identify – also thanks to your feedback.

Under the safety menu, you can quickly disable/enable ActiveX filtering or configure the Tracking Protection, a new feature that gives you more control over privacy – based on lists maintained by trusted partners.

You can read more about what’s new here and have an overview from the IT Professionals perspective here. The IE team did a great job towards adopting standards, improving performance, simplifying usability, ensuring user privacy and security, as well as everything else that you told us you wanted from your browser. Now is the time to benefit from that work, as consumers of the web.

What about our creators of the web – NZ web developers? Is your website taking advantage of some of the future web capabilities offered via IE9? Examples could include integration with Windows 7 (site pinning, jumplists), use of hardware acceleration, or utilising the power of HTML5. If so, we would love to hear from you, and you can go into our IE9-Ready Website competition! To enter just send us an email outlining what you’ve done to msdnnz@microsoft.com before 5pm 28 February 2011. The best submission will win Prezzy Cards worth $200! Check out our blog post for terms and conditions. If your site has yet to take advantage of these capabilities, have a read about what you could do – it is very easy to set up!

Thanks,

Mat.

Mat Velloso
Technology Evangelist
Microsoft New Zealand
Blog | Twitter | Email

Subscribe to the NZ MSDN Flash.

Questions, comments? Email your feedback to msdnnz@microsoft.com.