Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 sneak peak with HTML5 support

Posted on 16 Mar 2010 at 18:01

As we reported yesterday, Microsoft has demonstrated Internet Explorer 9 today. The company has also provided a Test Drive version of the software for developers to download.

Key to the new browser is support for HTML5, which will include support for multimedia content without being so reliant on plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX. IE9 supports a number of HTML5 specifications including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing and the video and audio tags using H.264, MPEG4, MP3 and AAC codecs.

The demo version of Internet Explorer 9, which is effectively just the rendering engine without any of the normal browser controls, has a new JavaScript engine, which should improve performance. However, when we tested it using the SunSpider Java benchmark, we found that IE9 was faster than IE8 and Firefox, but still slower than Chrome. The results in milliseconds (smaller numbers are better) for the browsers are:

IE8 - 4699.4ms

IE9 - 819.4ms

Chrome 4.0 - 518.6ms

Firefox 3.5.8 - 1047.6ms

A feature that IE9 has, but no other browser does, is GPU-accelerated HTML5 for Nvidia graphics cards. Microsoft's IE9 site has demonstrations of the technology working. The 3D 'Flying Images' demo ran at 4fps when we used Chrome, but in IE9 ran at 59fps thanks to our Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX graphics card.

It's still too early to tell how good IE9 will be, as HTML5 isn't popular enough and the browser's not even at Beta stage. Still, as first looks go it's an impressive start.

Author: David Ludlow

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