IE9 Developer Preview Available

The first preview of Internet Explorer (IE) 9, released in Mar. 2010, lets developers test IE’s improved support for HTML5 and other emerging standards, as well as the browser’s new JavaScript engine, which can dramatically improve performance on script-heavy sites. The preview also showcases IE9’s ability to use a PC’s graphics processor for better rendering of animation and video in HTML 5 pages and of graphics in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. The preview is for developers only, and many features are purposely missing. Also, plans call for IE9 to run only on Windows Vista and later, not XP.

Focus on Performance, Standards

Coming less than a year after the release of IE8 and less than six months after Windows 7, the Platform Preview of IE9 shows that Microsoft is developing its Web browser on a separate schedule from Windows, with much faster refreshes. IE faces significant competition from Firefox, which has steadily grown in popularity since its introduction in 2004 and now boasts 24% worldwide market share, and an emerging threat from Google’s Chrome, which has garnered more than 5% market share after being introduced in Nov. 2008, making it the number-three browser—ahead of Opera and Apple’s Safari, which have been in the market for much longer. (Market share statistics are for Feb. 2010 from NetApplications.)