Microsoft today released the fourth and most likely last platform preview of IE9. The browser gains more performance in JavaScript and now comes with full HTML5 hardware acceleration, even if the current Firefox 4 Beta outruns IE9 in the category Firefox is promoting so feverishly. However, when the IE9 Beta arrives next month, we should expect a solid and modern browser that will leave IE8 behind.
HTML5 rendering in IE9 PP.
IE9 PP4 shows further improvement and suggests that IE9 is soon ready to play with the big boys. A quick test shows that IE9 PP4 completes the SunSpider test in well under 500 ms (474.2 ms) and is far ahead of Mozilla’s new JaegerMonkey engine, which is currently in the 620 ms range, but well behind Safari, Opera and especially Google, which has hit 301 ms with its latest Canary developer build on our test system.
The latest JavaScript improvements are due to the fact that the engine is now a core part of IE9 , which establishes a direct communication between the script engine and the browser, according to Microsoft. Overall, Microsoft’s JavaScript benchmark data may be a bit optimistic, especially since Microsoft claims that IE9 is now faster than Safari 5.0 and just behind Chrome 5.0, which we were not able to confirm.
IE9 PP4 hit 1177 points in Google V8, well ahead of Firefox 4 Beta 2, but behind the other browsers. Chrome 6 Dev currently scores about 5500 points. IE9 excels in hardware acceleration, but not as much as Microsoft tries to make us believe. In HTML5 acceleration tests posted by Microsoft, IE9 PP4 is outrun by Firefox 4 Beta 2 as long as Firefox’ hardware acceleration feature is manually activated. We were not able to replicate the test results posted by Microsoft and found Firefox to be as fast as IE9 PP4 in most tests and up to 40% faster in the Psychedelic Wheel test. Chrome does not offer hardware acceleration and posts in these tests generally less than 1% of the performance of IE9 and Firefox 4.
As far as HTML5 standard support is concerned, IE9 is still far behind Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, according to HTML5test.com. The Acid 3 test now comes in at 83 out of 100 possible points, which is much better than IE8, but still behind IE’s rivals, which now score at least 97/100 (Firefox 4 Beta 2).
You can download the latest platform preview here.
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