Microsoft has released a rough developer’s preview of their ever-so-popular Internet Explorer browser (IE9). The IE9 Platform Preview can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site and run within Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2). The preview is not a full-fledged browser, but essentially a frame for showing off the new browser’s JavaScript and rendering engines. Microsoft is back in the browser race, an analyst said today after the company unveiled a rough developer’s preview.
“They want to be more than a follower or just on features parity,” said Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish as she talked about what she saw as a recommitment to Internet Explorer (IE). “And they’ve created a whole new team for IE. Microsoft is clearly taking the browser seriously again.”
Among the newer faces on the IE team, said McLeish, is Ted Johnson, the co-founder of Visio Corp. and from January 2000 to March 2003, a corporate vice president at Microsoft. Johnson, who according to his LinkedIn account rejoined Microsoft in August 2008, now carries the title Partner PM Architect on IE, and is the senior architect responsible for the browser’s graphics and rendering.
“Microsoft has lined up some very experienced engineers” for the IE team, McLeish said. “It’s really a crack team.”
Microsoft may not believe that only its engineers can create the best Windows browser, but it certainly thinks they’re up to the task. As proof, McLeish noted the hardware acceleration Microsoft’s touting for IE9, which doesn’t run on Windows XP.
Earlier today, Dean Hachamovich, the general manager for IE development, spelled out IE9’s performance enhancements during a 40-minute presentation at MIX10, the Web developer conference Microsoft kicked off Monday. Among them: background JavaScript compiling on a separate processor core, graphics processor acceleration of text and graphic rendering, and an upcoming update to the IE9 preview for hardware acceleration of HTML 5 video.
“IE9 is exponentially faster at dynamic rendering than its predecessor,” said McLeish. “It’s very slick, very speedy.”
Hachamovich repeated a claim made last fall by his boss, Stephen Sinofsky, Microsoft’s president of Windows, that IE9 had essentially closed the enormous JavaScript performance gap between itself and rivals made by Mozilla, Google and Apple. Today, Hachamovich showed a slide during his keynote that put IE9’s platform preview as slightly faster than Firefox 3.6, slightly slower than Safari, Chrome and Opera 10.5 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks.
“We’re faster than many other browsers,” Hachamovich said, pointing to the slide. “And we’ve only done a little bit of optimization for SunSpider so far.”
| Browser | SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark result (in milleseconds—lower is better) |
| Firefox 3.6 | 1,405 |
| Google Chrome 4.0 | 749 |
| Internet Explorer 7 | 47,119 |
| Internet Explorer 8 | 9,015 |
| Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview | 1,310 |
| Opera 10.5 | 577 |
| Safari 4.0 | 790 |
As you can see, the improvement from IE7 to IE8 to IE9 is remarkable. While Chrome, Opera, and Safari still lead by a good margin, the number-two browser Firefox is now in IE’s rear-view mirror.
But there’s more to performance than SunSpider. The Testdrive site for IE9 has a slew of demos that show fast, smooth performance for things like resizing fonts, zooming around maps, and “pulsating bubbles.” This speed boost comes from Internet Explorer 9’s use of graphics hardware to accelerate image and display operations.
A big thrust of Internet Explorer 9 is support for some emerging HTML 5 standards. High on everybody’s lists among these are support for the Video and Audio tags. These tags allow playing of those media types directly from the browser, as opposed to needing a plug-in such as Adobe’s Flash Player to do so. An advantage to Microsoft’s implementation over that in Firefox is that IE9 will support industry-standard MPEG-4 and H.264, rather than the laudably royalty-free but little-used Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats supported by Firefox. It’s noteworthy that the dominant leader in Internet video, YouTube, uses H.264 in its HTML 5 test site.
Unfortunately, this first build of IE9’s platform doesn’t yet implement the HTML video, audio, or canvas tags. The last one allows drawing within a Web page, and is already supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Another problem with support for these tags: A lot of sites test for your browser, so if they see you’re using Internet Explorer (any version), you get an alternate page telling you that your browser doesn’t support HTML 5 video, even if it does. Microsoft’s IE general manager, Dean Hachamovitch (whoLance Ulanoff interviewed on video ), hopes developers will start testing for the capability, rather than for the browser, so that content will work across browsers.
The W3C’s SVG standard holds the promise of scalable, animated, interactive graphics on the Web without the need for plugins. Again, sites’ testing for browsers rather than features made it hard to find SVG samples on the Web that would show up in IE9.
Internet Explorer 9 has a long way to go, but it’s off to an impressive start. “I think this shows that Microsoft is serious again about innovation,” said McLeish. “And when Microsoft gets serious about something, you’d better be ready to get out of the way.”
Microsoft has its work cut out for it in reclaiming its once overwhelmingly-dominant lead in browsers. IE has lost approximately 8 percentage points of share as measured by NetApplications.com in the last 12 months, and now accounts for about 62% of all browsers in use. Even the introduction of IE8 a year ago hasn’t stemmed the losses.
source : http://tech.bangladeshio.com/microsoft-is-back-in-the-browser-race-with-internet-explorer-9-532.php
source : http://tech.bangladeshio.com/microsoft-is-back-in-the-browser-race-with-internet-explorer-9-532.php