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Microsoft has officially released IE9 to the public, making IE6 even older! Microsoft has improved leaps and bounds since those days however, and the new IE9 is a testament to that.
GPU Rendering
Benchmarks abound; you can actually see the difference. Even on older hardware having the GPU render the canvas helps immensely. Now instead of everything loading at roughly the same speed, you can actually witness IE9 rendering the entire page, and waiting for Flash to finish! This really helps with the responsiveness and smoothness while you are browsing around, notably scrolling under low-end hardware.
CSS3 and HTML5 Support
Although it doesn’t support everything, Microsoft has really stepped up supporting a large number of these new standards. Let’s hope this continues, and help remove some of the negativity around Internet Explorer. If you’re interested in what exactly IE9 supports, head on over to Microsoft’s MSDN page.
Integrated Tracking Protection
In the world of spam, tracking, and targeted advertisement, this is a great new addtion. IE9 Includes the ability to add pre-made, managed, and custom tracking lists. This helps protect you from people attempting to track your behavior, including your searching, surfing, and buying habits. However, it cannot protect you until you set it up. It is very straight forward: just click on the Cog in the upper right, safety, tracking protection. From here click “Get a Tracking Protection List Online…” and select one (or more) lists you want to use to help protect your privacy.
Media Query Support
One of the more interesting aspects of CCS3 is Media Queries. It really adds a new layer of creativeness to the designers and how they can create a flowing, unique, and engaging website at various levels of screen size and hardware. You can read more about an actual use of these in a previous post from J.
On September 23, Google released Chrome Frame, an add-on for Internet Explorer (IE) 6-8. Chrome Frame allows websites to request that IE visitors use the rendering engine behind Google’s speedy Chrome web browser instead of IE’s native engine. A TechCrunch synopsis and the Chrome Frame page provide further explanation. This article offers strategic insight into why Google is aggressively pushing their own browser technology, whether Chrome Frame will succeed, and how Chrome Frame should be seen by web development clients.
Ask any web developer what they think of Internet Explorer 6 and you’ll hear an earful. The 8 year old web browser still commands nearly 20% of the browser market and is woefully inadequate at supporting modern standards, incurring millions of dollars for legacy support every year. IE 7 and 8 were big improvements, but as we’ve opined on before, even IE8 fails to support forward looking techniques supported by the competition.
In the 6 month since IE8′s release, competitors Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Opera, have all seen major updates. All of them introduced performance upgrades, in particular to their JavaScript engines. JavaScript is increasingly the engine for dynamic content on websites, from animations to on the fly content loading without page reloads (via AJAX). Google’s browser, Chrome, positioned itself from day one as focused on performance, JavaScript performance in particular. At least in theoretical tests, it more than delivers on its promise.