New IE9 Preview: Performance, Hardware Acceleration, and Acid3

At MIX, Microsoft showed that they are back in the browser game with a preview of IE9 “platform” (platform seems to mean ‘haven’t got it together as a real browser yet, but we wanted to get it to you guys ASAP’).

Today, they updated the preview as they said they would (claiming they will do new releases every 8 weeks or so).

Table stakes these days is performance. IE8 is so far behind, but the IE team is showing that with IE9 they will be strong contenders:

To go along with this, we haver the GPU story of hardware acceleration. Test drive some new demos such as this Flickr Explorer or the browser flip

There are other tools too:

The Developer Tools in IE9 Platform Preview 2 include new features. The Console window is now a full tab that includes diagnostic information from IE. Developers can use the “Change User Agent String” menu item to experiment with sending different that UA strings to sites with every request, selecting from preset strings or creating their own custom string. This complements another feature we’ve included – the new IE9 UA string. (Steve! Update BrowserScope! 🙂

This is good timing. Giorgio Sardo of Microsoft is on a browser panel that Ben and I are moderating at Web 2.0 Expo today. The panel has other heavy hitters: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software), and Alex Russell (Google). We are going to have some fun 🙂