After the Enlightened Glitter news of new Mozilla firefox, Microsoft has also break the news of Internet Explorer 9 continues its steady pace toward a final release.
Today’s milestone is an important one. The fourth and final Platform Preview, like its predecessors, is intended for developers to test their web sites and report bugs. Int other words, the developers are examining IE9 that it should have to fullfill the user requirements.
Most of the major pieces of IE9’s HTML5 support were put in place in the previous release. This preview incorporates a slew of bug fixes (more than 1300 bug reports have been filed at Microsoft’s Connect site) and shows off what Microsoft claims are big improvements in its new Chakra JavaScript engine. IE boss Dean Hachamovich argues that how a JavaScript engine is integrated into the browser is as important as the engine itself, if one talk about performance:
The fourth Platform Preview moves the new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, inside IE9 and brings them together into one single, integrated system.
With the help of this deep integration, the performance of real world websites significantly improves, and IE9 becomes the first browser to have a shared DOM between the browser and the script engine based on ECMAScript5. The benefits start with real-world performance and consistency.
In addition to this, how IE9 becomes the above par Web Browser with its integrated JavaScript Engine? In response to that, Microsoft has published test scores that show the new JavaScript engine acing the SunSpider test (and beating the current shipping version of Safari), but the company continues to emphasize holistic, real-world performance measurements.
Probably the single biggest headline in today’s release is IE9’s final score on the Acid3 test. You can see IE9 adds key HTML5 features in new preview release, each successive platform preview release has sported an improved score on the 0-100 Acid3 scale, starting at 55 in March, increasing to 68 in May, and jumping to 83 in June. Today’s release hits a 95, and Hachamovich argues that striving for a perfect 100 on this imperfect test isn’t necessary or desirable. The two Acid3 failures are on features that are “in transition”.
Today’s newly released performance tests continue Microsoft’s tradition of showing off full hardware acceleration using PC-based GPUs to render text, graphics, and media, both audio and video. The former is guaranteed to get that silly hamster jingle stuck in your head for the rest of the day, and the latter could cause vertigo. You’ve been warned.
What’s next? A beta, of course, with a full-fledged user interface instead of the bare frame that the platform previews use. Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin earlier declined to offer an exact shipping date but suggested that the next release would follow the same cadence as the platform previews. On that timetable, it’s reasonable to expect a beta in the second half of September.
Test Drive Page Perview of Internet Explorer 9
