Microsoft will have better performance and support for standards.
Microsoft has begun work to concretize what will be the next version of Internet Explorer. It said Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division of Microsoft in the main speech during the second day of its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.
According to Sinofsky has IE9 project only been going for three weeks now. What's IE team has done since March, when IE8 was released, is unclear. But probably the group has scheduled what IE9 shall be, for some news and improvements are already in place in the internal test versions.
Internet Explorer has received much negative review because of limited support for newer web standards and because of much weaker JavaScript performance than all the competing browsers.
JavaScript performance can be very important when running Ajax-based web applications.
Sinofsky said that the IE team's goal is to make IE better in both areas.
Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky revealed little about IE9 at PDC 2009.
Among other things, to IE9 already at the current stage, achieving 32 of the 100 points is possible to achieve the Acid3 test. IE8 achieves 20 points. It is not so bad improvement in three weeks. But it is also a requirement that the test should be performed with a constant speed, and it is not the case for IE9 today.
Sinofsky also mentioned HTML5, but keeping the cards close to what the company may want to support. However, he told the IE9 on today's stage manages 572 of the 578 tests of the CSS Selector Test Suite. In comparison, manage IE8 only 349
It also promised that IE9 to get support for borders with curved corners.
Microsoft has long believed that browser performance not only focuses on JavaScript performance, and of course right there. But JavaScript performance is not without significance, Microsoft now seems to have realized, the company is working on a new JavaScript engine for IE to bring performance up to approximately the same levels as its competitors.
Sinofsky showed the chart below where the results different browsers achieved in SunSpider test are compared.
Benchmarks done with SunSpider with different browsers in November 2009. (Illustration: Microsoft)
Microsoft announced today that IE9 to get hardware accelerated display of text and graphics through Direct2D. This will provide faster and more beautiful rendition including fonts and complex graphics by utilizing the computational power of your PC's graphics processor. It all should work without any changes must be made with today's Web pages.
Microsoft has not indicated any date for when IE9 can be expected, either as a publicly available test version, or as final edition. But with the pace of competitors introducing new technology, both in the user interface and the shell, can Microsoft not use very long time to finish the new version.
Microsoft has posted three videos on this page as each deals with its share of IE9 news so far.
There is also information about the news in this blog post.
