A new release of Internet Explorer Platform Preview 7 is now ready for you to download and test. Coming just three weeks after Platform Preview 6, Platform Preview 7 demonstrates the improvements that have been made in IE9 performance.

For users this means in IE9 pages will load faster, and everyday websites will be snappier.

For developers, this means you can push the boundaries of what is possible on the web. To illustrate this take a look at the Galactic demo in IE9 PP7 or you watch the video here, it’s incredible to think that this is achieved with just JavaScript and HTML5.

There are many subsystems that create the effect of speed for a browser: HTML Parsing, CSS Parsing and JavaScript being just three of a long list.

Different websites place different loads on different subsystems. It is IE9s goal to improve performance across all subsystems and therefore enhance the users perception of speed whilst they are browsing real websites.

As a side effect of the performance improvements we have made, our scoring in benchmarks has also improved Testing on the 16^th of November against the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark showed us to have the fastest performing JavaScript engine of all the major vendors.

Whilst Microbenchmarks like SunSpider provide a convenient target for browser vendors to aim at, we have for a long time held the view that  Microbenchmarks can be counterproductive and in some cases misleading. Therefore the IE9 team remain committed to  improving real world performance, which involves making sure all subsystem perform well, not just the ones that are frequently benchmarked.

The new IE9 Platform Preview 7 is fast, but don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself.