IE9 Beta Launches September 15
Internet Explorer 9 will be launched at an event in San Francisco September 15. The launch celebrates the Beauty of the Web. More information is available on the Windows Team Blog posting Announcing the Beauty of the Web event for IE9 Beta Launch.
About Internet Explorer 9
Get the current preview at the IE9 test drive site.
Here’s some key features for developers in IE9:
Fully Hardware-Accelerated HTML5. IE9 offers consistent, fully hardware-accelerated text, graphics, and media, both audio and video. Try Hamster Dance Revolution, IE Beatz, or MSNBC Video in different browsers to experience the difference. Psychedelic Browsing demonstrates what HTML5 canvas can do when it’s fully accelerated with the GPU.
Modern SVG. With Platform Preview 4, we’re excited to show highly-interactive and integrated, or modern, SVG. Typically, developers think of SVG as the graphics format for static engineering diagrams and images. With HTML5 and hardware acceleration, SVG is an excellent choice for a new class of interactive, animated scenarios. You can see great SVG performance, animated via JavaScript, with the SVG Dice example.
Native JavaScript Integration. One aspect of doing these things well is integrating the JavaScript engine natively inside the browser, rather than bolting it onto the side to support multiple JavaScript engines as some other browsers do today.With this change, communication between the browser and script engine is now direct, which significantly improves performance for real world websites.
Fonts. developers can use the Web Open Font Format (WOFF, supported in IE9 Platform Preview 3 as well as other browsers) for both HTML and SVG content. It works well in conjunction with the CSS3 Fonts module and has broad support from leading font vendors (e.g. here, “a majority of font makers have already settled on WOFF or services like Typekit as their format of choice”). WOFF fonts are a better long-term solution
Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation