Latest Internet Explorer 9 platform preview arrives early
Today, just under one month after last update from PDC10, Microsoft has rolled out Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7.
The last update included new support for two HTML5 technologies: CSS3 2D Transforms, and recognition of HTML5 Semantic Elements as object-type HTMLElement. This time around, the focus is on improving the browser's real-world performance with hardware-accelerated HTML5.
The Internet Explorer team has tuned the Chakra JavaScript engine to respond better to patterns commonly found in the real world, which are shown off on the updated IE Test Drive site.
"In addition to the other parts of the browser platform (like graphics rendering), performance involves other aspects as well: how well does the browser guard the user from slow add-ons, or from unreliable sites that crash?" Dean Hachamovitch wrote in the IE9 team blog today. "Enabling users to pin websites to the Windows taskbar means that users can go directly to sites without having to launch the browser and navigate. Making the most of your device for web browsing is significant as well. Taking advantage of the whole PC, and using the specialized graphics hardware and the many cores that modern PCs typically include, offers huge performance gains."
IE9 Platform Preview 7 actually arrived quite early this time around, compared to previous versions, which are released approximately every eight weeks.