Internet Explorer 9

First impressions of IE9 are very promising considering that we are at the final release of the IE 9 Platform Preview! It load pages extremely fast and renders graphics quite fast and clean. That’s quite obvious as the test drive is a stripped down version and hence, one would expect it to run fast. Performance degradation starts with add-ons and third-party toolbars that literally hook your web browser. From personal experience, rule number 1 is – Keep IE clean (if you can) and it will perform well. One has to wait till September when the first beta is to be released as to test its functionality from an end-user perspective.

The most noticeable feature in IE9 is definitely the hardware acceleration capabilities. The new JavaScript engine takes advantage of the multi-core computing environments which should provide better web experience with better use of computing resources – we shall see! IE9 will support the latest developments in HTML, Graphics and others. Briefly, it will support HTML5 and CSS3 latest specifications, XHTML parsing, SVG and the latest video and audio codecs. The new features will make way for developers to produce richer web graphics.

Microsoft has shared the release of new software development kits (SDKs) for the Open Data Protocol (OData) that makes it easier for developers to access data from the cloud and enhanced the JavaScript Library (jQuery). This will help web developers to build cross-platform Web and mobile applications that use data delivered from the cloud.