Microsoft this week at the MIX10 conference previewed its Internet Explorer 9 web browser. The preview release, which is available for download, provides support for new elements in HTML5, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), CSS3, XHTML parsing and additional video tags.
Microsoft’s General Manager of Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, said that MSIE9 adds support for those new technologies that developers have been longing for, and is able “to take standard Web patterns that developers use and run them better on modern PCs through Windows.”
There has been a lot of interest and debate about HTML5 and its support for video tags. This release of Internet Explorer provides such support, with tags available for H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC codecs, leaving out support for the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora video codecs.
A new JavaScript engine in this release named “chakra” tested high on the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test, scoring higher than Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and not far behind Apple Safari 4.05, Google Chrome 4 and 5, and Opera 10.5.
