Microsoft showed Internet Explorer 9 for the first time yesterday at its Professional Developer Conference, but a technical preview won't be available before next year (perhaps at CES 2010 in January).
Instead, Windows Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky demonstrated the latest test version, with the Trident rendering engine running on DirectX instead of GDI - to show that IE development is still going on, and making progress on performance and support for standards.
Like Ray Ozzie at an earlier keynote, he promised that Microsoft would "make Internet Explorer the best browser for Windows and the most world class browsing experience we can develop" but he said it would be delivered "in the most responsible way" to get "a good balance between the things we know we have to do and moving the whole notion of browsing forward".
That doesn't mean canvas or SVG support, at least not at this stage. Although Microsoft is working on HTML 5 standards, Sinofsky said that's not necessarily the main focus for IE9: "There are emerging standards that are still incomplete and draft, and we want to be responsible about how we support that and don't generate a hype cycle across the board for things aren't there yet."
And while he showed IE's ACID 3 score going up from 20 in IE 6 to 32 for the test system and agreed "that's a test we need to do a better job on," the emphasis is on supporting standards like CSS and elements like selectors and rounded corners (using CSS3 border-radius) that web developers commonly use to build sites. He showed IE9 running CSS tests from the CSS3 info site and getting a rather better score.
Early days for IE9
After only three weeks of development (the time since Windows 7 shipped has been spent on planning), Sinofsky said the performance is already significantly better than IE8, showing results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark that are about five times better than IE8 (which was twice as fast as IE7).
It's also far closer to the JavaScript speed of the pre-release versions of Firefox, Chrome and WebKit. "This isn't just speed," Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team, told TechRadar. "This is speed with security, with compatibility. You can do anything fast if you do not have to be correct."
Sinofsky also pointed out that browser performance is about a lot more than JavaScript, showing a breakdown of the time taken by rendering, handling CSS and all the other things the browser does for the Excel web app and two popular news sites. Even on a script-heavy site, JavaScript took at most a third of the time needed to load the page. "By the time you get down to this kind of performance," said Sinofsky, "it's swamped by other subsystems".
IE9 GPU acceleration
IE9 will also get a big speedup from switching the Trident rendering engine from running on the now-elderly GDI to hardware-accelerated DirectX. "We have all this amazing new hardware," points out Hachamovitch. "There are graphics cards in notebooks that blow away what you could get on the desktop just a year ago. And what takes advantage of it? Nothing."
SMOOTHER AND FASTER: DirectX rendering makes animation and graphics move far faster and much more smoothly, plus text is much smoother and easier to read
Web designers don't have to take any changes to their code to get faster rendering with much lower CPU usage, and crisper text that animates smoothly (rendered by Direct2D and DirectWrite). Sinofsky showed a page built with the Bing API, loading maps from Bing as usual, but panning at 60 frames per second rather than the 7fps GDI managed.
Microsoft hasn't yet said whether this will only work on Windows 7 and Vista or on XP as well. "Look for more detail on this in the future," Hachamovitch told us, "but the short answer is that the better the hardware, the better the experience."
IE9 is the first browser to use DirectX, although Safari on Mac uses Quartz rendering. It's not just that hardware graphics acceleration hasn't been widespread enough to take advantage of before. "The biggest disadvantage of DirectX," says Hachamovitch, "is that it's really hard to get it right. As you saw today, there's a huge benefit but it takes a lot of work to get all of the details right – like how do controls like Flash work and what about printing?"
That means that while it makes sense for Microsoft, with the Windows-only IE, cross-platform browsers may not want to invest in development just for Windows, which could give IE9 a lead that's hard to match.
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Your comments (9) Click to add a new comment
ar09
November 21st 2009
9. crazy! this is the greatest news ever. i use windows and ie all the time, you guys suck! :c)
and now theyll make use of the video card 3d graphics, AWESOME!! :0p
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samjjordan
November 20th 2009
8. In my opinion, having a browser like IE in today's browser war is laughable. They have no chance unless they make some big changes. Focusing on hardware acceleration with DirectX is good, but that means Windows only. Granted there are a large number of people who only use Windows, unfortunately for them, but Microsoft's problem is they are only catering to this crowd. If Microsoft wants even a fighting chance at a popular browser they need to make it run on at least 2 platforms (Win + Mac) with hardware acceleration and extension support, and of course they shouldn't bother releasing anything until it scores at least 90 on Acid3.
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webgodjj
November 20th 2009
7. Hmmm... doesn't seem like this is going to be a ground breaking browser. Still failing 2/3 of the acid test, not interested in moving forward with html 5, and points out that speed isn't really that important?
Sorry, but every other browser strives hard to meet standards. Safari has a 100% acid test score, and FireFox is at around 93%. These browsers also have increased their speed while, yes, worrying about security.
In my opinion as a coder, the MS team would be better off scrapping IE, and starting over. It might help to take a fresh stab at this browser, as it doesn't seem that it's going to be "ground breaking" for many years yet.
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tech89
November 19th 2009
6. Microsoft Internet Explorer Faster? What!? After IE6 it pretty much panhandled, the speed was awful after 6. 7 and 8 are painfully slow and only used as a last resort. Firefox is very good, however recently I have found google chrome to be that little bit more stable.
I use FF or GC on a daily basis. The nice thing I like with chrome is that if one tab crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser which is something FF likes to do when it breaks.
If your in the mood for gadgets and gizomos then firefox is for you, eith all its addons.
If your after simplicity an a cleaner laid out browser then Google Chrome is for you.
As for speed, both are arguably pretty equal and to dwell on that would be pointless.
And if your after a piece of scrap there's Internet Explorer!
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lovlid
November 19th 2009
5. @ jcbeeno and the rest of your name changes.
Do YOU get people to download the trojan ridden software on your crappy website, scumbag spammer.
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lovlid
November 19th 2009
4. Oh, and I'm almost sure "Font Smoothing" was brought out with os x AND Windows XP at the same time.
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