Newsbyte – Microsoft released the first platform preview of the next Internet Explorer, which comes two years after the first preview of IE8 and unveils an entirely different product approach: Microsoft departs from a strategy of pushing proprietary strategies and is focusing on technology trends instead. And IE9 is faster. A lot faster.

IE8 is to browsers what Windows Vista was to operating systems. Both gambled with Microsoft’s dominant market share by disregarding user and developer needs in favor of an agenda that the company apparently without outside input. IE9, it seems, could be a revolutionary product for Microsoft’s product strategy, as it catches up with rivals and even sets trends that more than likely turn IE in a much more attractive proposition.

(12 Images)

Gone are the pitches for new and proprietary features. Instead, the focus is clearly on a much needed JavaScript engine that is much faster than IE8’s antiquated technology, faster graphics rendering that will tap into the horsepower of the GPU, significantly enhanced standards support as well as comprehensive HTML5 integration. There isn’t much users will see as new functionality as virtually all new features are under the hood.

IE9 has a new JavaScript engine called “Chakra”, which, according to Microsoft, is about five to six times faster than the IE8 engine. Microsoft claims that the platform preview version currently available is slightly faster than Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 Beta, while it is still trailing Safari, Chrome and Opera. And Microsoft claims that the engine isn’t even tuned for today’s JavaScript benchmarks like Sunspider yet. We expect further improvements while we also know that especially Mozilla, Apple and Google aren’t standing still either.

Microsoft said that “IE9 uses Windows’ modern graphics APIs and the PC’s hardware to accelerate all the graphics and text that the browser draws on the screen.” The “hardware” now also refers to the GPU: HTML5 promises a similar significant step in web content richness as HTML4, which arrived more than a decade ago – and the GPU may allow a much higher graphics quality in content that is displayed right in your browser than what we are used to today.

In addition to HTML5, Microsoft says that IE9 has a much better integration of other standards as well, such as DOM and CSS3. When applied to the Acid3 standards benchmark, IE9 currently scores 55 of 100 possible points, while IE is stuck at 21. Chrome, Safari and Opera score 100 of 100 points and Firefox 3.6 scores 94 of 100 points.

All new features of IE9 in detail are (taken from the IE9 PP Release Notes):

Enhanced CSS3 support:
- Rounded corners via border-radius property
- RGBA color model
- opacity property
- CSS3 selectors
- New DOM Level 2 and DOM Level 3 support and updated behaviors

Added HTML5 support:
- Improved parsing of generic elements
- Improved parsing of overlapping tags
- script and style block parsing changes
- Text selection APIs

SVG features:
- Basic shapes: rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polylines, and polygons
- Coordinate systems, transforms, and units
- Document structure, metadata, and extensibility functionality
- Paths, including full capabilities of the path element and d attribute

Additional platform versioning capabilities:
- New document mode
- Developer Tools additions
- Performance improvements
- HTTP inspection

You can download the IE9 Platform preview here.

IE9 needs to be a winner, very much like Windows 7 appears to be. Over the past 12 months, IE has lost a total of 8.14 points of market share, according to Net Applications, while Firefox gained 2.12 points, Chrome gained 4.09 points, Safari 0.83 points and Opera 0.12 points. IE currently holds a market share of 61.58%.

According to Net Applications, IE6 and IE7 account for about 98% of IE’s total market share loss at this time: Over the past 12 months, IE8 has not been able to pick up users as quickly as IE6 and IE7 lose them. In the same time frame, Microsoft has transitioned only 76% of the users lost by IE6 and IE7 to another IE version. It seems that IE8 has a tough time keeping the pace of IE7 all by itself. Most recently, the market share loss of IE7 alone exceeded the market share gains of IE8.

IE9 is on the right track. Here are some performance results.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.