Microsoft Previews IE9 — HTML5, SVG, Fast JS

suraj.sun sends this excerpt from CNET on Microsoft's preview of IE9 in Las Vegas just now. "At its Mix 10 conference Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it's calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now. Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware. One big change in the JavaScript engine Hachamovitch is proud of is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer's processor." Microsoft didn't say what codec they were using for the HTML5 video demo, but the Technologizer says it's H.264.

Comments

firefox is getting old

[sopssa]

It seems that even IE beat Firefox in Javascript performance now. Firefox sure has been slacking recently. There's still road ahead though, Chrome and Opera are leading.

No, PNG was primarily created to be patent-free

[dwheeler]

No, not even slightly true. The primary reason that PNG was created was to create a patent-free format. Then, since they were creating a format anyway, they decided to make other improvements. For more information, see "History of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Format" by Greg Roelofs, which was published by the Linux Gazette and later the Linux Journal. I know, this is Slashdot, I'm not allowed to cite sources :-).