Advertisement

About Internet Explorer 9

Posted On August 27, 2010 by Sneha Philipose filed under Programming

HTML clipboard

Microsoft has released a preview version of Internet Explorer 9 with improvements in performance and adoption of standards like SVG, CSS, HTML5 and more.

The Internet Explorer Platform Preview4 is for developers and designers who want to test the new Internet Explorer 9 web development and design capabilities, including the new JavaScript engine – codename Chakra – as well as support for standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM. It's not meant to be a mission critical browser application, but enthusiasts looking to test out something faster than what they're running now have the option to do so.

New JavaScript Engine

The IE9 Platform Preview includes the first release of our new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, which fundamentally changes the performance characteristics of JavaScript inside Internet Explorer 9. Chakra includes a new JavaScript compiler that compiles JavaScript source code into high-quality native machine code, a new interpreter for executing script on traditional web pages, and improvements to the JavaScript runtime and libraries.

Chakra alongside IE9 has several valuable features like:

* Background Compilation
* Type Optimizations
* Fast Interpreter
* Library Optimizations

Performance

The performance results that Microsoft has released for IE9 preview, show that its JavaScript engine is faster than other browers.

Hardware Acceleration

With Internet Explorer Platform Preview, Web developers can now take advantage of hardware-driven rendering of graphics and text:

Internet Explorer Platform Preview uses the DirectX family of Windows application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable several advances for Web developers. The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU. Plus, you’ll take advantage of these changes automatically while continuing to author sites with the same standards you’re used to.

HTML5

Several features from the HTML 5 spec have been implemented in IE9. Two of the most anticipated HTML5 features now supported in Internet Explorer Platform Preview are the new video and audio elements. The video and audio elements are both defined within the Embedded content section of the HTML5 specification.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has become one of the most requested features for implementation in Internet Explorer, and is a powerful way to add high-fidelity, easily scalable visuals—from small and simple to large and complex— to a website without the need for a plug-in or separate viewer.

CSS

IE9 preview has improved support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) compared to version 8 that was compliant with the CSS2.1 specification. It has added several many components of CSS3 and more are planned.

At this time, the new CSS3 features that are supported are:

* Rounded corners via border-radius property
* RGBA color model
* opacity property
· CSS3 selectors


There are several other features are implemented in IE9 like

* Canvas element,
* Web Workers
* Open web font support

and more.

In order to use IE 9 you will need to have Windows Vista or Windows 7 For more features of IE 9 visit Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide

 

Comments

Post a comment

Name

Email address

URL

Comment

If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam