Internet Explorer 9: Microsoft's next gen browser revealed!
Internet Explorer 9 announced new features today, to “break the glass ceiling of browsing” in the words of Windows 7 head honcho Leila Martine, by using your computer’s GPU to improve IE9′s performance.
The IE9 demo we saw today will support the HTML5 video tag and canvas drawing, and will use your hardware’s GPU for browsing, means snappier browsing, with pages will load quicker and be faster, with better performance, for example, the fps animations can be pushed to can be as much as double other browsers, as was demonstrated via the medium of an animated aquarium of fish.
This all paves the way not only for better online gaming but also for better videos, freed from plugins, and more gorgeous web pages via scalable vector graphics, meaning that you can zoom in or out of an image or font, without affecting its resolution, retaining the sharpness and clarity.
In short, everything is better, faster, stronger on IE9.
The glass ceiling Microsoft wants to smash is a shift in web browsing, so that there’s the functionality for developers to build web pages users can experience more like native apps. Martine said: “We want the browsing experience to be immersive – just like when you’re in a native app, which browsing isn’t at the moment. We’re helping developers evolve the web, so this paradigm shift can happen.”
The demo included an Amazon page, displayed with a layout remarkably like something you might see on a smartphone app, with big, simple icons, plus super slick visuals and interactivity.
It looks like Microsoft have smoothed out, and got rid of lots of the clunkiness in past iterations of IE. Once developers begin to implement the code and tags, we might see a whole host of flashy looking websites, and perhaps even a return to IE from other browsers that have been gathering momentum and becoming established like Firefox, Chrome and Opera.
As for the UI, which may make or break IE9, Martine said she couldn’t reveal the exact date for its release, but hinted that details would come “very soon”, and with the current schedule of releases round about every eight weeks, it looks like we can expect something in the near future.
