After several months of teasing Internet Explorer's upgrade with a series of feature-free developer's previews, Microsoft has unleashed on the world an Internet Explorer 9 beta (32-bit Windows 7; 64-bit Windows 7; 32-bit Windows Vista; 64-bit Windows Vista) with some impressive new features. Like any properly named beta, though, there are also some bugs to be ironed out.
This is the biggest overhaul to the browser since Internet Explorer 7 landed. The changes to the interface are enormous, the browser's overall usability has greatly improved, it's more secure, and it's significantly faster and more standards compliant.
Performance
That last point is a key issue, as the majority stakeholder in Windows browser usage finally enters the all-out war between browser publishers. What will come as a surprise to people who didn't check out the Internet Explorer 9 technical previews is that IE, long known for its struggle with standards compliance, has made serious strides in the other direction. HTML5 receives a lot of love from IE in the beta, including support for the < video >, < audio >, and < canvas > tags, and better support for DOM, CSS3, and ECMAScript5. While this may sound like alphabet soup to some, the importance can't be understated: when browser makers split on how to render code, it can make a single site look odd or function improperly across browsers.
That last point is a key issue, as the majority stakeholder in Windows browser usage finally enters the all-out war between browser publishers. What will come as a surprise to people who didn't check out the Internet Explorer 9 technical previews is that IE, long known for its struggle with standards compliance, has made serious strides in the other direction. HTML5 receives a lot of love from IE in the beta, including support for the < video >, < audio >, and < canvas > tags, and better support for DOM, CSS3, and ECMAScript5. While this may sound like alphabet soup to some, the importance can't be understated: when browser makers split on how to render code, it can make a single site look odd or function improperly across browsers.
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