Today at MIX10 Microsoft demoed Internet Explorer 9 and some of its new features which include HTML5 support and CSS3 support; you can download and test it. The browser also makes use of technologies in more recent PCs and operating systems to allow a much quicker rendering of web pages which means that IE9 will not work on Windows XP machines.
Microsoft were keen to stress that they plan to add much more to their browser over the coming months and will be providing a new version of IE9 every 8 weeks, however they didn’t mention a time frame for the browser.
A developer version of IE9 has been made available today which has no user interface elements so don’t expect to be able to use this as a replacement for your current browser but it does show how well the updated rendering engines work, especially if you compare the sites with your current browser.
The only thing I have to not be as good with the rendering wit IE9 is it doesn’t scale images as well as IE8 does, you can see the difference by looking at the image in the sidebar in the screenshot above with the same image in IE8 below.
When demoing IE9 a nice t-shirt was shown off with “nine” written on it where the “e” was the “e” in the Internet Explorer icon and in increasingly true MML fashion I’ve made a wallpaper.
