What is new in Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4

Posted Date: 10-Aug-2010	Category: Internet Explorer	Rating:
Author: D.Jeya Kumar(JK)	Member Level: Diamond	Points: 48

This article explains what is new in Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4 and it is the final release before the Beta which is scheduled to release in Sep 2010. IE 9 PP 4 test results shows it has lot of performance improvement and supports HTML5, CSS3 and more new technologies

What is new in Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4

Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4 released 5 days back and Microsoft has fixed lot of bugs which is reported in Platform Preview 3. It is the final release before the IE 9 beta which is expected to be released on September 2010. Microsoft is more concerned about it loading performance which is slow compared to other web browsers.

IE 9 PP4 scores 95 on the Acid 3 web standards test which is 1 point ahead of Firefox and it is the best for IE as IE 8 scored just 20, but opera scores 100. IE 9 PP4 has passed on 2138 tests which include HTML5, CSS 3, JavaScript and EcmaScript 5.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) fonts, filters and animations features are not supported IE 9 and it might be removed from the Acid 3 test. SVG is planning to make changes to SVG fonts and its filters and animations and it may be separated as an optional specification. IE 9 PP4 suggests developers to use the Web Open Font format (WOFF) and it is one of the best solutions in terms of long term.

IE 9 Platform Preview 4 supports some of the complex SVTG contents which are not supported in its previous PP3 which is not working in other major browsers like Firefox 3.6, Safari 5, Chrome 5 and Opera 10.6. Along with other SVG related performance improvements makes IE 9 PP4 an impressive comeback after its PP3.

JavaScript engine is integrated with IE to boost the performance and it is codename is Chakra which is working as a separate component. A Single DOM is going to be shared with browser and javascript.IE 9 using the graphics card hardware acceleration which will boost the performance of IE 9 compared to other browsers and it will eat the RAM memory. The complete HTML5 is running from the hardware acceleration. Hamster Dance Revolution is one of the applications and it can create interactive games without using plug-in like Flash and Silverlight.

Microsoft is not going to remove plug-in support in IE 9. It will continue to support the plug-in.

IE 9 JavaScript shows tremendous improvement in the recent benchmark test and but still it is behind Google Chrome 5.x, 6.0 and Opera 10.6

IE 9 become the first browser to share the DOM with browser and the ECMAScript5 and it will improve the performance of the real world web sites.

You can install the IE 8 and IE 9 Platform preview 4 side by side and you can test the performance of IE 9.

HTML5 video running in IE 9 PP4 may rarely have some green lines on some of the videos and it is a known issues and it will be fixed in the future release. Dynamically changing the source of the HTML5 video settings will not work at some time and it will be fixed in the next release. Script property of the Document object will be in correctly displayed and it will be fixed soon. Style property of the CSS view which is included in the developers tools are having CSS tracing shown in either style or trace style trace sections in the HTML view.

If you pass null object to Object.createfunction will throw exception as TypeError. New Searching feature is available in the Network Capture tool.

Many of the know issues are listed in IE 9 PP4 test drive site.

Click here to see the Known issues in IE 9 PP 4

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