This week, the IE team continued to act on it’s commitment of releasing a technology preview every 8 weeks. Welcome “Platform Preview 3”, the 3rd preview of IE9 (sometimes called IE9 PP3). This is not the full blown browser, but a peek at the rendering engine. This release did not disappoint, if you’re checking out the IT news sources around the internet. It’s a very quick install, and you can find it at the IE Test Drive site.

Why did IE9 get all of this positive review even before it’s a beta release? There are a variety of factors here, but here’s my reasoning:

  • IE9 is serious about being the top performer on HTML5 sites. This is evident in the increasing Acid3 score, as well as the new demo’s on the Test Drive site. Run your favorite competitive browser on there, and see how it rates against IE9 PP3.
  • IE9 shows it commitment to HTML5 by supporting the <audio>, <video>, and <canvas> tags.
  • IE9’s performance story is enhanced by leveraging the entire machine, not just the CPU.
  • The Test Drive site has new samples, intended for developers to see how IE9 will fast-start your appetite for HMTL5 and a new wave of internet richness.
  • DownloadSquad does an independent video on comparing IE9 to other browsers, and it’s blowing a lot of folks minds. Chrome and Firefox fans: take a look. There’s still a ways to go, but it’s getting interesting.

 

Others quotes about IE9 PP3:

  • “In a series of demos showing off the new capabilities, IE team members gave us a taste of just how smooth advanced operations in the browser can be when they are taking advantage of a computer’s multiple cores and GPU” - Jason Kincaid/TechCrunch

 

  • “Not only is canvas being supported, it is also being hardware accelerated, continuing Microsoft's efforts to give Web applications the ability to exploit the extensive hardware capabilities of modern PCs.” - Peter Bright/Ars Technica

 

  • “This is a seismic shift for the web,” said David Ragones, product marketing manager at Nvidia. “It is a GPU (graphics processing unit) enabled web.” - Dean Takahashi/Venture Beat

 

  • “In all my meetings with the IE team since last November, I’ve been especially impressed with the careful attention they’ve paid to engineering, not just shoveling in new features or pushing out new builds. There’s a lot of confidence from this team as well. They seem determined to shake up the web establishment by setting the bar for the most standards-compliant web browser around, for a very demanding audience.” - Ed Bott/ZDNet

 

  • “It’s admirable that Internet Explorer is supporting so much of HTML5 in the next release (“We’re all in on HTML5,” Mauceri says) but Microsoft is taking their level of commitment up a whole extra notch by building a hardware-accelerated browser that can access the GPU for native animations and native media playback.” - Michael Calore/Wired

 

 

  • “In a series of side-by-side comparisons with Chrome and Firefox, Microsoft sought to show that IE9 is running circles around its rivals with smoother animation and speedier Web app performance.” – Kevin McLaughlin/CRN

 

  • “The best thing about IE9’s support of < video >, < canvas > and < audio >, and one of the aspects that give the successor of Internet Explorer 8 an edge when compared with rival browsers is that all the elements mentioned above are hardware accelerated.” – Marius Oiaga/Softpedia

 

  • “A raft of demos of Platform Preview 3 soundly and repeatedly thrashing both Firefox and Google Chrome in a series of graphics and video demonstrations.” - Rik Myslewski/The Register

 

  • “This isn’t a full-blown browser–it’s IE9′s new rendering engine, with HTML5 capabilities, hardware-accelerated graphics, and other goodies, plus enough of a front end that developers and browser junkies can get a taste of what’s to come.” – Harry McCracken/Technologizer

 

  • “Good luck getting another browser to run Microsoft's standards-based demos as well as they run in IE9. They're pretty brutal without hardware acceleration.” – Lee Mathews/DownloadSquad

 

Other sources on IE9: