SillyDog701

[beanboy89]

Today, Microsoft released a "Platform Preview" of the upcoming Windows Internet Explorer 9. The preview release, which is only intended for web developers, doesn't have a user interface, only a simple menu with a few commands. Internet Explorer 9 will only run on Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 systems.

The preview seems to preform quite competitively on JavaScript benchmark tests, but still falls short on the Acid3 test.

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UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100205 SeaMonkey/2.0.3

[Antony]

Thank you Billy,

Standards compliance and performance appear to be the main themes of Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft said it will support various parts of the HTML5 specification, including CSS3, SVG and XHTML parsing. The audio and video tags will also be supported, using the H.264 and MPEG4 for video, and MP3 and AAC for audio.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

[Pu7o]

Pure support for H.264/AAC on IE without Flash, QuickTime, or other similar plugins? That actually sounds pretty interesting.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

[Antony]

I hope they release IE9 for Windows XP as well.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

[Don_HH2K]

I'm wondering if IE9 including support for H.264 video will make it enough of a de-facto standard to force Mozilla and Opera to implement it. Right now, both are hellbent on using the "free as in speech" Ogg Theora codec over a licensing exemption in H.264 that's due to expire in 2016 but will likely be renewed (again, no less), even though virtually all HTML5 video content is presented as H.264.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100310 Minefield/3.7a3pre

[Pu7o]

Not to mention that H.264 is, in fact, a published standard (MPEG-4 AVC), so it's not like they'd be adapting a proprietary format or something.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

[Don_HH2K]

The issue they're having isn't that H.264 is or isn't an open standard, but that it's patent-encumbered. There's some exemption that makes H.264 royalty-free for consumer use until 2016. The problem is that under current copyright law, the patents expire in 2025, not 2016, and Mozilla isn't banking on the MPEG-LA renewing the royalty-free license.

I should add that the MPEG-LA already renewed the exemption once, earlier this year.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100310 Minefield/3.7a3pre

[Pu7o]

I don't see why they couldn't just implement it, and then later take it out if the license isn't renewed.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

[Pu7o]

I hope they release IE9 for Windows XP as well.

Microsoft has officially announced that IE9 won't support XP.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

[Don_HH2K]

I don't see why they couldn't just implement it, and then later take it out if the license isn't renewed.

Personally I don't see why they don't just make their codec interface modular, that way somebody could just write a wrapper around libavcodec or similar. The HTML5 spec doesn't specify a codec for video, so it's not like they would be breaking the standard by doing so.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100310 Minefield/3.7a3pre

[Pu7o]

Ironically, there's already a Firefox extension to be able to play HTML5/H.264 videos.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

[Mandrake]

I hope they release IE9 for Windows XP as well.

Microsoft has officially announced that IE9 won't support XP.

Windows XP is pretty old now. It's had a good run, but It's in the process of being phased out very slowly. Microsoft reduced XP to extended support last year, that means that they'll still support it but only with security patches. Total support doesn't end until 2014 IIRC, giving the XP people plenty of time to migrate to something newer.

These results show IE9 running significantly faster than IE 8.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

[Mandrake]

It turns out that IE9 will take advantage of GPUs as well.

They're using Direct2D, which made it's debut in Vista, which is why you won't ever see an XP release.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

[jjssparkle]

All too ironical for me! Indeed!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7

[iJohnE]

IE 9 Looks promising. I like the GPU usage, as well as the improved JavaScript performance.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100205 SeaMonkey/2.0.3