Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Normally I wouldn’t get too giddy about another browser release but this is pretty damned cool.

Why?  Check out the technology that’s going to be built into Internet Explorer 9:

• COMPILED JAVASCRIPT
  Sure, accessing Internet web sites from dumb/no-CPU hardware is possible however if you do have a good hardware locally on your Windows PC, why not take advantage of the power of your CPU by background compiling Javascript for execution speeds on web sites that blow doors off of interpreted script? 

  Internet Explorer 9.0 will provide ultra fast execution of Javascript on complex pages by just-in-time compiling the code and running it as a lower level executable on your system providing web page script performance that exceed that of Firefox 3.6.

• MULTICORE OPTIMIZATION
  I don’t think people fully understand how important this is – Internet Explorer 9 has been rearchitected to take advantage of multi-core systems, which of course is the standard today for desktops.  There are many optimizations that have increased core usage to improve usage densities such as improvements in multi-threading however the example that is brought up most frequently is that IE9 separates out the Javascript engine as a separate process and allows execution to run on a core separate from the rest of the processing required for other browser operations. 

  Since the separate core used by the engine in many respects has a higher dedication to Javascript instead of sharing cores which are known to be used by both IE and other processes, cache swapping on the CPU is minimized, allowing for greater performance.

• HTML5 COMPLIANCE
  The web will be powered in the near future by HTML5, providing a rich Web standard for a variety of new interactions & visuals with users – many of which are unique to Flash or Silverlight-based experiences today. 

  Internet Explorer 9.0 will natively support HTML5 and with it web standards for sites that use it.  Providing a ACID3 score of 55/100 out of the box delivers a level of compatibility with recent web standards unseen by modern browsers today.

• GPU-POWERED GRAPHICS RENDERING
  With the emergence of HTML5 comes HTML5-rendered graphics & animations.  Using the local GPU on the system, Internet Explorer 9 provides users with an accelerated view of HTML5 graphics simply by using the local hardware of your PC, most specifically the GPU. 

  This is incredibly important because the difference in performance for sites that take advantage of Javascript & HTML5 rendered graphics is huge.  In a test does with Ars Technica, Chrome, Safari, & Internet Explorer 8 can’t display fast moving high fidelity imagery at anything more the 8 fps.  Opera & Firefox’s current versions were able to operate closer to 50-60fps however the image quality was terrible.  Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 9 was able to display perfect image quality at a full 60fps – because of the engineering in the engine that allows it to tap the Windows PC’s GPU.

DOWNLOAD:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/