Microsoft IE9 Beta Doesn’t Live Up To Expectations

Although pretty much everyone will agree that IE9 will be a major improvement over IE8, and that Microsoft is taking the browser in the right direction, thus far, IE9 Beta is not living up to expectations. Some reviewers aren’t seeing the performance enhancements that have been promised, and leaked screenshots are not showing a nearly finished product.

With a projected beta release date of September 15th, IE9 doesn’t have much time to become the innovative browser that has been promised. Microsoft’s benchmarks show that IE9 PP4 is faster than Firefox and Safari, and almost as fast as Chrome and Opera, but benchmarks performed by TomsHardware don’t measure up to those standards.

To be fair, the latest version, IE9 PP4, is about 12x faster here than IE8, but the same can be said about the latest Firefox browser. As for support for HTML 5, IE9, as of the latest release anyway, does not support the canvas element. According to Caniuse.com, IE9 only supports 81% of HTML 5, with an HTML5Test score of only 85 of 300 points. IE9 still has a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time.