Internet Explorer 9 Unveiled: Faster, Web Standards Questionable

Microsoft has given Internet Explorer 9 its first public airing. The browser looks set to make up a significant gap in speed compared with its rivals but will reawaken controversy over Microsoft's policy on web standards.

It's no secret that many tests show Internet Explorer is much slower in loading pages, particularly those that use javascript. However, it was still surprising to see the firm's Steven Sinofsky openly admit that gap, with his presentation even noting one test which showed Internet Explorer achieving just 50% of the speed of some rivals.

According to Sinofsky, Internet Explorer 9 tackles that problem and is already proving to be speedier after just three weeks of development work. He believes that by the time it is released (likely in 2011) any difference in speed will be insignificant.

Standards Compliance Remains An Issue

One of the big questions over the browser is how well it follows web standards: the guidelines which are supposed to be followed by all browsers and web designers to maximize the chances of a web page appearing and operating the same way on all computers.

Microsoft says it intends to do more to meet such standards but is unwilling to commit to meeting HTML5. That's the next incarnation of the most fundamental web standard which is still in progress; for the moment Microsoft says it needs to see the final standard before it can make a decision about following it.

In the meantime, it appears clear that Internet Explorer 9 will do a better job of meeting standards than its predecessor. On one ranking which scores browsers out of 100 on a range of standards, IE9 received a 32, compared with just 24 for IE8. However, that's far short of the main challenger to Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, which scored a 92 in its latest beta edition. (Source: techradar.com)

Graphics Cards to Share Workload

Another major change will be the way Internet Explorer deals with displaying graphics. Where appropriate it will now pass some of the grunt work over to the graphics hardware on the computer itself, a system designed to increase efficiency but which could place too much pressure on the user's PC. (Source: pcpro.co.uk)