Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 Released

Microsoft has just released Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 on their IE9 testdrive website. Users should not confuse the platform preview releases with the beta release of Internet Explorer 9. The former come without a full web browsing interface, i.e. a address bar is missing. The platform previews show the development process of Internet Explorer 9, and give testers and tech enthusiasts time to test the recent development builds of the browser.

Platform Preview 7 was released a month after the beta of Internet Explorer 9, which indicates that it is ahead by that in development. So what have the developers done in that month?

For one, they have optimized the performance of the web browser further. Especially the JavaScript benchmark results indicate that Internet Explorer 9 will not be slower in that department than the other fast browsers. In fact, it might even be the fastest browser at this point. All popular browsers, that is Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Opera 11, Firefox and Safari have a score of less than 500ms in the Sunspider test.

But as I have said earlier, with all browsers gaining in speed and performance, it is other features that will determine a web browser’s popularity. The release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 may shed some light on those features.

The Internet Explorer 9 test site has some new HTML5 demos that are really nice. Shakespeare’s Tag cloud parses one of Shakespeare’s work and creates a tag cloud doing so. Then there is HTMl5 Sudoku where the browser is used to solve a number of games. IE9 needs 1.031 seconds to solve 5000 Sudoku games on insane, impressive (suppose the other browsers do not need much longer). Galactic is the third and final demonstration. It calculates the Galactic score by rotating planets in our solar system.

Internet Explorer 9 shapes up to become a solid web browser, one that should replace older versions in a heartbeat. It is to early to predict how the end product will fare, but one thing seems to be certain: Speed will not be an issue anymore.

You can read all about the new platform preview over at the Internet Explorer blog.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday November 17, 2010 -
Tags:ie9, internet explorer 9, internet explorer 9 beta, internet explorer platform preview

Responses so far:

1. Kyler IE Outreach Team says:

   November 18, 2010 at 1:58 am

   Great post detailing the progress of IE9 Beta! The demos discusses are just a few of the ones available in the new platform preview, so give it a try yourself and see the power of IE9.

   Cheers,
   Kyler
   IE Outreach Team

   Reply
2. mma173 says:

   November 19, 2010 at 10:55 am

   Great post; but could have been better if have had included another chart that does not have IE8 and Firefox 3.6.*. This would have emphasized the difference in-between the other browsers.

   Thanks’

   Reply