Microsoft Shows Sneak Preview Of Internet Explorer 9

[Andy Dixon]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/software-computing/microsoft-offers-sneak-peek-at-internet-explorer-9/' target='_blank'>http://www.digitaltrends.com/comput...net-explorer-9/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"A publicly available platform preview demonstrates Microsoft's strides toward speed, compatibility and new features. Unimpressed as we may have been when Microsoft released a final build of Internet Explorer 8 a year ago, the company hasn't stopped toiling away on the most popular browser in the world. And it's ready to show off what its software engineers have been hard at work on over the past year. On Tuesday, Microsoft allowed developers to peek through blinds into its R&amp;D labs with the release of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1268816530.usr11334.jpg" style="border: #d2d2bb 1px solid;" /></p><p>As the battle of web browsers continues unabated, Microsoft have set up a website where you can get a glimpse at their next incarnation of Internet Explorer. Microsoft are planning to make a number of new changes to IE9 including a new faster Java engine, HTML5 support, and allowing the web page rendering engine to utilise your graphics card processor to render your page, rather than your CPU.&nbsp; This, in theory, should make the whole web&nbsp;browsing experience much faster&nbsp;as it&nbsp;makes use of a resource in your PC that isn't really used much&nbsp;when you are web surfing.&nbsp;&nbsp;I look forward to seeing some real world tests of this feature and how it actually performs compared to existing browsers.</p>

[Reid Kistler]

Speed never hurts - as long as the browser is reasonably protected against the variety of attacks that seem to be ever present on the web these days.

Use Firefox most of the time, flipping over to Opera every now & again. Like a lot of the features Opera presents, but it is more likely to cause problems with some websites than Firefox. (Or perhaps the websites are more likely to cause problems with Opera....).

Wife flops between Firefox & IE8, although she sometimes uses Chrome, but generally avoids Opera unless trying to check rendering of a website she is working on.

Even for me IE doesn't go away, however - it is still needed for browser access to Windows Update - so will be interested to see what happens with IE9....