Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 Review

Microsoft, the software giant is going to release its latest browser Internet Explorer 9, this news triggered a wide discussion in the internet market. Microsoft released a developer’s version of the browser to give a glimpse of its new state of the art browser. In this article we would discuss in detail various features of this upcoming browser.

Windows Internet Explorer formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer, is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6. Since its peak of popularity, Internet Explorer's usage share declined in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers to 45% to 55%, and is slowly trending downward. With release of Mozilla Firefox 4 and much faster and lighter Chrome by Google, Microsoft is struggling to retain its share in the browser market. This suggests that IE9 would be a light weight and interactive browser Perhaps that's why we'll be seeing some of the company's biggest changes yet with Internet Explorer 9. While we've yet to hear much regarding actual features, Microsoft has been particularly forthcoming where it matters most — performance. Much work has been done on the browser's Trident rendering engine, with improvements to JavaScript performance and extension handling as well. And of course, big gains in terms of HTML5 and CSS3 support have been touted too. According to Microsoft, Internet Explorer 9, currently in development, will have complete or nearly complete support for all CSS 3 selectors, border-radius CSS 3 property, faster JavaScript, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles, and hardware accelerated rendering using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Microsoft has confirmed that WOFF will also be supported. WOFF is "a strong favorite" for standardization by the W3C Web Fonts Working Group. Windows Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky said in a conference “Microsoft would make Internet Explorer the best browser for Windows and the most world class browsing experience we can develop" but he said it would be delivered "in the most responsible way" to get "a good balance between the things we know we have to do and moving the whole notion of browsing forward" Sinofsky said the performance is already significantly better than IE8, showing results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark that are about five times better than IE8 which was twice as fast as IE7. It's also far closer to the JavaScript speed of the pre-release versions of Firefox, Chrome and WebKit. "This isn't just speed," Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team, told TechRadar. "This is speed with security, with compatibility. You can do anything fast if you do not have to be correct."

Development of IE9 began shortly after IE8 had been released. Microsoft began taking features suggestions through Microsoft Connect soon after IE8 was released. So far, the IE team is focused on improving support for HTML5 and adding support for SVG and XHTML. Microsoft first announced IE9 at PDC 2009 and spoke mainly about how it takes advantage of hardware acceleration in DirectX to improve the performance of web applications and improve the quality of web typography. At MIX 10, the first IE9 Platform Preview was released, which featured support for CSS3 and SVG, a new JavaScript engine called Chakra, and a score of 55/100 on the Acid3 test, up from 20/100 for IE8. On May 5, 2010, the second IE9 Platform Preview was released, which featured a score of 68/100 on the Acid3 test and faster performance on the WebKit Sun Spider JavaScript benchmark than the first IE9 Platform Preview. On June 23, 2010, the third IE9 Platform Preview was released, which scores 83/100 on the Acid3 test and introduced support for , , and  elements and WOFF. On August 4, 2010, the fourth IE9 Platform Preview was released, which features a score of 95/100 on the Acid3 test and a faster JavaScript engine than the third IE9 Platform Preview. The final build of IE9 is expected to be released in 2011. Support for the HTML5 video and audio tags was also promised.

New Features and Improvements:

Speed and standards, these two words sum up the goals of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 9 browser. Main improvements and new features of IE9 include:

1.      New Jscript Engine

2.      HTML 5 support

3.      Web typography

4.      GPU acceleration

5.      Smoother and faster

6.      Memory Use

7.      Hardware acceleration

8.      SVG support

9.      CSS support

10.  Accessibility

11.  Developer tools

New Jscipt Engine

JavaScript is a key part on every browser. This language is used to create interaction with the user at client side. When a web server sends site content to a browser it uses a scripting language. This script is the same regardless of if you are using an AMD, Intel or a MAC, or an iPad. This is good for the server because there is no needed for different versions of the same page for every environment but it means the browser needs a way to render the code on your computer. Thus, the browser uses a component that interprets, compiles, and executes the code. To cope with the ever-increasing demand for faster JavaScript engines, the IE Team has developed a new one code named Chakra. It is a JScript engine developed by Microsoft for their upcoming Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) web browser. A distinctive feature of the engine is that it compiles scripts on a separate CPU core, parallel to the web browser. The engine will also be able to access the computer's graphics card processor (GPU), in particular for 3D graphics and video. Microsoft's development of the engine was in direct response to the increasingly faster competing browsers, on which IE8 was lagging behind particularly in terms of JavaScript processing speed. Sun Spider tests performed on August 2, 2010 have shown the then-current preview version of IE9 (using the then-current version of Chakra) to be faster than Firefox (with Trace Monkey) and Safari (with Squirrelfish Extreme), but slower than respectively Chrome (with V8) and Opera (with Carakan).

HTML 5 Support:

HTML5 support in IE9 is probably the most powerful new addition to Microsoft's latest installment of Internet Explorer. Being that IE9 will support HTML5 features in its new browser, Internet Explorer 9 will be a way more powerful upgrade from its predecessor, Internet Explorer 8. New features in HTML5 with hardware acceleration support elements include video and audio, which provides playback of embedded video and audio content without having to install add-ins. For now, Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 9 Platform has the following HTML 5 features:

• The video and audio elements
• The canvas element
• The Selection interface
• Improved parsing of HTML elements
• Text selection APIs

Web typography:

Internet Explorer was the first browser to support web fonts through the @font-face rule, but only supported the Embedded Open Type (EOT) format, and lacked support for parts of the CSS3 font’s module. IE9 completed support for the CSS3 font’s module and added WOFF support.

GPU Acceleration:

A graphics processing unit or GPU (also occasionally called visual processing unit or VPU) is a specialized microprocessor that offloads and accelerates 3D or 2D graphics rendering from the microprocessor. It is used in embedded systems, mobile phones, computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for a range of complex algorithms. In a personal computer, a GPU can be present on a video card, or it can be on the motherboard. IE9 will also get a big speedup from switching the Trident rendering engine from running on the now-elderly GDI to hardware-accelerated DirectX which means Internet Explorer 9 will move graphics and text rendering to the graphics chip, using DirectX's Direct2D. Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware, resulting in graphics and performance improvements throughout the browser including the first to deliver hardware accelerated scalable vector graphics.

Smoother and Faster:

New graphics capabilities and increased productivity Internet Explorer 9 provide a basis for rich and realistic perception. Text, video and images reproduced with hardware acceleration, due to what the web sites work as quickly as installed on the computer program. High Definition Video reproduced without jerks, schedule becomes more clear and reproduced without delay, the colors are realistic, and sites like never interactive. Thanks to improvements in the subsystems, such as a new mechanism Chakra JavaScript Engine, Web sites and applications load faster and faster react to user actions. Web designers don't have to take any changes to their code to get faster rendering with much lower CPU usage, and crisper text that animates smoothly rendered by Direct2D and DirectWrite. Windows senior vice president Sinofsky said the performance is already significantly better than IE8, showing results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark that are about five times better than IE8.

Memory Usage:

Memory usage of internet explorer 9 was also better than its older versions. On a site like CNN.com IE9 preview required 70MB of RAM, Chrome took 58MB, Firefox 78MB, and  IE8 64MB. So it's not wildly out of bounds in memory use. But IE9 did noticeably load the page in a snap, whereas in all the other browsers I could see images drawing.

Hardware Acceleration:

 Internet Explorer 9's Direct X video acceleration will work with scalable vector graphics. With Internet Explorer Platform Preview, Web developers can now take advantage of hardware-driven rendering of graphics and text. Internet Explorer Platform Preview uses the DirectX family of Windows application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable several advances for Web developers. The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU. Plus, you’ll take advantage of these changes automatically while continuing to author sites with the same standards you’re used to. The direct X video acceleration function of IE9 will use less CPU power than other popular browsers.

SVG Support:

SVG is used for describing two-dimensional vector graphics. The idea behind SVG is very simple: if you use a formula instead of a grid of pixels for describing a graphic then the image is not going to have distortions when you resize it. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, is becoming a first class citizen in IE9. It seems that SVG will be a strategic choice for Microsoft in order to support vector graphics in the next generation of web applications. In terms of interoperability between the various vendor implementations:, Microsoft states that it will work with the SVG Working Group in order to ensure that its implementation will be interoperable. In a statement Microsoft stated “We expect SVG, supported by good user and developer experiences, to become an integral part of the web. SVG has many advantages over raster images. With our hardware-accelerated graphics, the time is ripe for a rich and interactive graphics-driven web.”

Following SVG features are implemented:

• Basic shapes: rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polylines, and polygons
• Clipping, masking, and compositing
• Coordinate systems, transforms, and units
• Document structure, metadata, and extensibility functionality
• Gradients and patterns
• Interactivity
• Linking and views
• Painting and color
• Paths, including full capabilities of the path element and d attribute
• Text

CSS Support:

IE9 preview has improved support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) compared to version 8 that was compliant with the CSS2.1 specification. It has added several many components of CSS3 and more are planned.

At this time, the new CSS3 features that are supported are:

• Rounded corners via border-radius property
• RGBA color model
• opacity property
• CSS3 selectors

Accessibility:

For fixed sites, you can proceed directly from the taskbar, Windows, without having to open Internet Explorer. Secure site can be a few seconds: click the pins in the address bar or click the site in a new tab and drag it to taskbar. That’s it. If the site is fixed, for it shows his badge, separate from Internet Explorer. Now, from your favorite site separates only one click. This feature brings into focus the site, and not the browser. Anchored sites are seamlessly integrated into a navigation system Windows 7. For every such site has a preview on the taskbar and a list of transition. Quick release tabs and Windows Aero Snap. Often, for the task have to open several Web pages or windows. Advanced tab in conjunction with the function of the Windows Aero Snap can quickly display just two sites or two pages. To do this, simply drag the page to different edges of the screen, and the sites are displayed next to each other.
Developer Tools:

Internet Explorer lags behind Firefox and Chrome in offering developers some handy tools, the new versions vows to offer the following features:

• Console tab
• Network tab
• UA switcher tool ( You can modify the browser type and version that your browser sends to the web server )
• Real-world performance measurement

From the above discussion it can be concluded that the new browser would be much faster than its previous versions and would most likely surpass Firefox if not chrome. However until the final release it is difficult to assume how it would compete with its rivals.

Microsoft has released 4 developer previews of IE9. Those builds have lacked any user interface (UI), and instead have presented the rendering and JavaScript engines in a wrapper that lacks even the most basic navigational aids, such as a Back button. Microsoft had planned to release the beta version of its next generation internet browser on 15^th September in San Fransisco but images of the new browser user interface were posted on Microsoft Russia website on 25^th August. From the leaked images it becomes evident that the new browser would be much lighter and simple than its predecessors, much like Google’s Chrome and Firefox 4. The new browser has a navigation bar and fewer controls. There’s a back button, a combined URL - search box at the top. All the interface elements now sit on the same row: a big back button and a small forward button, an address bar with embedded refresh and stop buttons, a tab area, and home, star, and gear icons. IE 9 is not overloaded with navigation elements, and compared with other browsers leaves more space for the site so now the user sees only what is necessary for navigation. The Russian Microsoft site said that there will be provisions for “recognized,” or “protected,” sites which will allow users to go straight from the Windows taskbar to these sites without having to open IE first. In other words, recognized, protected sites will be treated more like traditional Windows applications.