IE9: Microsoft’s Upcoming Weapon To Win The Browser War

Ever since the Mozilla foundation gave birth to its brainchild Firefox, the user base of Internet Explorer has been on a gradual but steady decline. IE 6 remains the most attack prone browser till date and its numerous bugs and performance issues has helped rival browsers like Safari and Opera to attract a significant number of web users away from IE over the years. The arrival of Google Chrome has only added to the woes of the Redmond based software giant. It attempted to regain the lost market share with a revamped IE7 and followed it up with IE8. However, the feature rich latest versions of Chrome and Safari hampered its effort to a large extent. As of November 2009, Firefox succeeded in grabbing 25 percent share of the total browser market.

That is why Microsoft is contemplating the introduction of a new version of its browser that can survive the onslaught of the rival products and offer the users better web browsing experience than ever before. Steven Sinofsky, the Windows President announced the development of IE9 at the Professional Developers Conference recently. However, the exact launch date remains to be known. According to Microsoft, the new version of IE will sport a new look and enhanced web page rendering engine beneath its hood.

The JavaScript rendering speed is an area where the present version of IE lags behind the competitors. As per the data given by Microsoft, a developer version of IE9 scores four times the marks than its predecessor in the Acid3 test, which is a very demanding benchmark for web 2.0 applications. The upcoming version of IE features hardware accelerated graphics and text rendering. According to the IE9 development team, this new technology will take a lot of load off the CPU and utilize the graphics chip in a PC to render media rich web pages. As a result, download and surfing speed will be improved drastically.

This move seems logical considering that Microsoft is going to launch online versions of its office suite. Apart from improving the speed the new version of IE will be compliant with the emerging web standards and the upcoming version of HTML. The IE 9 hardware acceleration relies on Microsoft’s proprietary Direct2D interface. Using this technology, IE 9 will smooth the text appearing on a web page resulting in reduced eye strain.

The scores of the developer build of IE9 in the synthetic benchmarks zoom past IE8 but it still has to go a long way before it can catch up with Firefox or Chrome. However, once the stable public release version comes out its performance will get improved. The IE 9 developer version comes closer to the rivals like Safari, Chrome and Opera in SunSpider JavaScript test but remains way behind Firefox. The industry insiders are expecting a 2011 release date for the full version of IE9. The development at Microsoft is likely to encourage other browser makers to revamp their existing versions and come up with a new release in the next year. At the end the users stand to benefit from the developments.

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