July, 2010

The network plays a crucial role in the overall performance of a web browser. The best way to improve network performance is to minimize the volume of network traffic by using HTTP compression and taking advantage of the browser cache. We’ve made a tremendous number of improvements to the way that Internet Explorer 9 caches content to ensure that as many resources as possible are loaded from the cache. This post describes those improvements which are now available in the third IE9 Platform...

With the recent release of the latest IE9 platform preview , we talked about how we’re rebuilding the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web, and to unlock a new class of HTML5 applications. One area that developers are especially excited about is the potential of HTML5 canvas. Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. In this blog post we discuss some of the details behind canvas and the kinds of things developers can...

A few weeks ago, we talked about the performance characteristics of our Flickr Explorer sample. We showed how hardware acceleration benefits real world scenarios such as browsing photos, and how easily web developers can build these types of applications. Recently, we released a new set of demos alongside the third IE9 Platform Preview . Today we’re going to discuss the Amazon Shelf concept application (also see the companion Channel 9 video ). Much like Flickr Explorer, Amazon Shelf...

When we first introduced our plans for Internet Explorer Platform Previews we said that “developers and people interested in standards and web development can try out new platform functionality and provide early feedback.” We are now getting such feedback on a daily basis and are using it to improve IE9. However, sometimes the impact of the feedback extends beyond just IE9. Here is the story of how some recent feedback regarding the third IE9 Platform Preview resulted in a correction...

Lost In Translation “ Web design is 95% typography ”. So much of the content produced and consumed on the web is text yet designers and users have been confined to a set of compatible fonts available across client operating systems. Escaping this typographical island has involved everything from cross-browser CSS workarounds, graphics-based solutions and even plug-ins , with trade-offs ranging from extra storage and bandwidth to reduced accessibility. As a result, typefaces have...

The latest Platform Preview Build includes two great interoperable features for working with the DOM – DOM Traversal and Element Traversal . These features provide web developers with simple, flexible, and fast ways of traversing through a document using the same markup across browsers. These features come in the form of flat enumeration, simplifying the DOM tree to an iterative list, and filtering which enables you to tailor the set of nodes you traverse. These features work with the same...