Developers got a sneak peak at Internet Explorer 9 at Professional Developers Conference (PDC09).

Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, shared an early look at some of the work under way on Internet Explorer 9, highlighting advancements in performance and interoperable standards, as well as advancements such as using DirectX to bring the full power of the PC to the Web experience.

In a blog posting, An Early Look At IE9 for Developers, the IE 9 team details some of the advances.

• Performance. Different sites – and different activities within the same site – place different loads and demands on the browser. The post details how each load is affecting the browser. “We’re looking at the performance characteristics of all the browser sub-systems as real-world sites use them. Our goal is to deliver better performance across the board for real-world sites, not just benchmarks,” writes Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team.
• Standards Support. Ultimately, we want to work with the community and W3C and other members of the working groups to define true validation test suites, like the one that we’re all working on together for CSS 2.1, for the standards that matter to developers. For example, this link tests one of the HTML5 storage APIs; some browsers (including IE8) support it today, while others don’t.
• Graphics Rendering. We’re changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers. The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Three videos on Channel 9 detail Microsoft commitment to Internet Explorer:

• Introduction, and Interoperable Standards
• Early look at the Script Engine
• Hardware accelerated graphics and text in the browser via Direct2D

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation