Yesterday Microsoft announced the preview release of the latest version (9) of their web browser, Internet Explorer. While the public wont see it for some time, this represents a big step in the right direction for Microsoft. They’ve already integrated full support for CSS3 selectors, improved HTML 5 support and increased their ACID3 score from 20 for the public release of IE 8 to 55. Their javascript engine is also showing major advances over IE 8 by running javascript as a separate processes in the background. This allows systems with multi-core processors to take full advantage of their hardware, reducing render time.
The major downfall thus far is that IE 9 will not be available on Windows XP. Unfortunately this will only hold back market penetration and mean that we’ll all still have to deal with IE 6 for a while.
Posted by The Rooster