Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview Now Available, No XP Support

By | March 16, 2010 | 30 Comments

Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview Now Available
Today Microsoft has released developer preview build of Internet Explorer 9 web browser. Although it does not include IE9 user interface (no tabs, no address bar), and/or never announced features, it’s equipped with new JavaScript rendering engine (codename Chakra) and hardware acceleration feature.

How does it stack up against its competitors?
Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview Now Available

Furthermore, Microsoft has improved CSS3, SVG2 and HTML5 support and keeps doing that. In earlier build, IE9 scored 32/100 in ACID3 test, while this build is now already at 55/100.

XP uses will have to upgrade their operating system, as IE9 supports Vista, 7 and upcoming Windows versions only.

Download.

Thanks to effzee and Shane for the news tip!

[digg-reddit-me]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Grrblt

    Cake for Microsoft, this is very good news. It supposedely has too.

    • Grrblt

      That was supposed to say to say that it supposedly has video too. Dunno why that fell away.

      I just tested and there’s still no complex graphics on peacekeeper.

  • http://operaner.net Andylee

    omg! Firefox is soooooooooo hmm… now… what did I want to say…

    ah yeah! IE is faster than Firefox! (ok, it will take a lot of time until IE9 is ready… but still… the speed-argument will be gone)

    Still not comparable to Opera, but…. IE will be back in the game! (competition! competition!) *laughing excitedly*

  • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

    Great news indeed. Maybe finally IE will be worthwhile. Notice how speed charts will change now without Opera 10.10 and previous IE’s…

  • Morbus

    I wonder by how much not having UI and features affects javascript performance… After all, Webikit is also blistering fast in comparison to any browser that uses it.

  • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

    No Theora! *sigh* Very nice release, I will wait so I can request Theora…

    • RamaSubbu SK

      Microsoft will not support Theora, until Firefox & Google does. If google changes its YouTube to support Theora then all browsers in this world should/will support Theora without any question.

      • ON_1

        Are you sure that Firefox doesn’t support Theora?

        • Morbus

          Firefox already supports Theora. At least to some extent. But I’m positive it supports it.

          • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

            IT does support Theora, no question. Google Chrome does too. When they tell us where to put out requests/questions I’ll beg for Theora!

  • RamaSubbu SK

    I’m happy with the improvement on IE 9, but still Microsoft have to do a lot on their browser, nowly they wokeup after IE 6. Thanks to Magic browser FireFox for wakeing them up :) Yes, definitely they are doing catching up job in many areas of browser and they are coming up at good speed to beat the rivals.

    My guess, the JavaScript engine speed has improved a lot to match the demand of hardware accelerator, not because of competitor.
    JavaScript speed alone doesn’t determain the performance of the browser. The real performance of a browser should be evaluted in all of the followings
    (1) Secure & Privacy
    (2) Stability
    (3) Speed – not only JavaScript, but also rendering, downloading.
    (4) Perfect rendering- Pixel level accuracy in rendering.
    (5) Memory consumption
    (6) Battery life -for netbook/laptop/slate scenarios
    (7) End User friendly – like better printing support,huge favorites management,
    (8) Developer friendly – standard compliance, better API to develop plugins,
    ..
    ..
    There might be some more to this list, but my worry is no browser reviewer or nuteral person is doing this kind of testing/review. Most of the reviews on browser are one side or reviews on only one aspect of a browser.

    For example, Opera says they have the fastest java script engine. But they consume more memory than IE 8 in most of the site. Now you cannot say Opera better than IE 8, both has plus and minus.

    We need one complete review of all the leading browsers for better judgement!

    • nobody

      add to that

      (9) developer tools for web authoring and debugging. stuff like firebug, DynaTrace, webkits traceing, visual studio (for IE). all these nifty header inspectors and injectors. this alone doesnt mean much, but when it is NOT there for particular browser, chances of it being supported on advanced sites rapidly fall. debuging by alerts() is gone now

  • effzee

    IE has always been good at hiding its memory usage amongst a bunch of other windoze processes since much of it is core tech in the OS. Therefore the memory use iexplore.exe is not a fair indication of how much memory IE is actually using.

    Memory usage wise I find chrome, FF and Opera to be fairly similar with a bunch of tabs and multiple sites open. There are a few mem leaks in the Opera 10.50 release build that are being addressed for 10.51, to be released shortly. A pre-release build is already out that fixes many of the memory issues.

    I find memory use to be no issue provided the browser does not eat into more than a certain amount of system RAM, say 20%.

    • RamaSubbu SK

      What do you mean by “core tech in the OS” ? Can you tell us what are those ?
      With the process monitor tool I could not find any extra process being created in Windows XP/Vista & Windows 7. I just verified in all three OSes.

      • Ichan

        The Os uses the Ie shell when establishing a network connection. For instance a program will use IE to update itself. Online help files are also delivered within IE.

        ….. As far as I know. I am probably wrong though

        • RamaSubbu SK

          Yes, these are all the other components that uses the IE engine to render. The memory consumed for these components will be within its own process. Like this when launch http://www.msn.com the memory consumed by IExplore.exe is the whole memory that is needed, nothing is hidden, I would say hidden memory are speculations that anti-IE/MS creates.

  • Ichan

    Very much impressed by those preliminary results. Well done Microsoft

  • http://my.opera.com/aleksander Aleksander

    I think this looks interesting. I’ll take it for a spin once I come home :)

  • Gabriela

    Won’t support Windows XP? To make us updating to the useless Vista or the new Windows 7? Just for the sake of having a supposedly better IE9?
    I think IE sucks anyway so I couldn’t care less!

  • forumchild

    MS not support XP?
    so by having the users just to use the IE9 browser, MS is driving them to upgrade either to vista or W7, i guess this is what they a call a better competition tactic.

    besides, is MS gonna keep naming their IE browsers in future as IE10, IE11, IE12, IE13, IE14, IE15, IE16, etc?

    • mabdul

      maybe IE X.0 ^^

      • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

        Or maybe IE 360 :P

    • RamaSubbu SK

      Firefox and Chrome will release browsers for Windows XP with this hardware accelaration.
      So as a Windows XP users we will not missing anything big in the Web for atleast next fews years.

      • web

        as far as i know ff chrome, and probably opera and safari versions for XP, will have some of the hardware aceleration, but not all available that does exist in vista/seven.

        nevertheless as i already said somewhere else , in my desktop computer i dont care about acceleration as the pc is already very powerfull and doesnt need it.

        where i could use is in notebook/netbook, but in there is the intel gma suck edition, so in the end i dont care either way

        • RamaSubbu SK

          Nope, you would still need the acceleration if a website want to do animation with JavaScript like here
          http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html

          Wondering how much frame per second (fps) you are getting in your PC in the above link.
          I have too Quad Core with 8 GB RAM and still I get only 5~10 fps.

          • Foo

            Don’t know about the web guy, but I get:

            60FPS zoomed out and 20-30FPS zoomed in on Firefox 3.6.
            60FPS zoomed out and 3FPS zoomed in on Opera 10.10.
            3FPS all the time on Chromium 5.0.307.11.

            Although all of the above get random lagging when the images are at the top dropping the FPS by 5-10FPS.

            This is on the 2.6.33 kernel running on AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ and 3GB memory due to a sucky BIOS with Compiz doing hardware rendering through NVIDIAs OpenGL.

          • web

            yep i got around 40-60 fps. tried playing around the controls to get less, got 25 fps

            core2duo 2,7ghz

  • Foo
  • Dels

    No XP support, mean i wouldn’t have a time to check it out, too bad for that (it’s my fault still using the old decade XP when 7 is out, right?)

    Btw beside that i can live happily using Opera, Chrome & Firefox there

  • http://www.firebugger.com firebug

    dammm still i <3 my firefox!!

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