MIX10: Internet Explorer 9

by March 17, 2010

Dean Hachamovitch's keynote at Microsoft's MIX10 conference provided an overview of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 release.

  • Internet Explorer 8 is the most used browser on the Web today but there are a lot of IE6 installs still out there. Help Microsoft kill IE6! Microsoft will continue to support ie6 with security updates but that’s it.
  • HTML5 applications will stress the browser. IE9 will focus on what HTML5 needs not on specific browser features. The goal is to make standard Web patterns run better and faster.
  • “Same Markup, Better Performance”
  • Performance: HTML5 apps need great performance. Different sites spend different amounts of time running Javascript. The computer’s OS can pitch in and help the browser with resource-intensive scripts.
  • IE9 will make Javascript even faster by using modern PC hardware to its fullest. Compiles Javascript in the background on the PC - no need for developers to rewrite their sites.
  • IE9 and Standards –the same code should work across browsers. That’s the goal of IE9. Wrote a script that checked what Web APIs were in use on the top 7,000 sites. Starting from this data to determine what IE9 needs to support.
  • GPU-powered HTML5 –take advantage of the graphic aspects of the Windows platform. IE9 is built from the ground up to take advantage of that. Hardware-accelerated SVG.
  • When SVG and CSS interact now, they don’t always do the same thing across browsers. Need to work through this with standards bodies.
  • Internet Explorer’s rendering engine uses PC resources to make ClearType sub pixels for smoother fonts.
  • IE9 Platform preview will be updated every 8 weeks with new forums and community feedback tools.
  • HTML5 Video coming in an update to the platform preview. Performance of HD video in IE9 uses much less CPU power.