Microsoft has just passed an important milestone on the road to shipping Internet Explorer 9, releasing a third Platform Preview for download by the public today.
This preview adds the most eagerly awaited HTML5 features to the IE9 engine, including support for the Canvas element and both audio and video tags. Based on test results I’ve seen, there are also significant performance improvements and a big jump in IE9’s score on the controversial Acid3 test page (although it still falls short of a perfect score). Like its two predecessors, this release contains only the most rudimentary user interface, allowing Microsoft to keep the dialog with developers focused on performance, standards compliance, and support for new HTML5 features.
What’s most remarkable about today’s announcement is that Microsoft is running well ahead of its initial, self-imposed schedule. The public promise by IE boss Dean Hachamovitch back in March was to deliver a new platform release every eight weeks. The first public release was on March 16, followed by a second release 50 days later, on May 5. Today’s release is exactly seven weeks after that. My colleague Mary Jo Foley says her sources are telling her this is the last platform release, and that the next milestone is a public beta in August. Based on the cadence Microsoft has established so far, that timetable makes sense: the next release should be ready on or perhaps a little before August 18, which is eight weeks from today.
Two weeks ago, in a series of meetings in Redmond, I saw this release in action and asked whether it was feature complete. “Almost,” I was told. Certainly the last major pieces of HTML5 support are now in place with the unveiling of support for the Canvas element and audio and video tags. That means that IE9 can perform hardware-assisted playback of H.264-encoded video on any Windows PC. In theory, at least, it should be able to pass every one of the HTML5 tests based on those features, which it previously failed. If there are any other serious omissions, we should hear about them within days, given the scrutiny this release will get from the developer community. (According to Microsoft, the two previous platform previews have been downloaded more than 2 million times. I expect this release to blow well past those numbers.)
With today’s Platform Preview 3 release, Microsoft also updated its IE9 Test Drive website, adding another 15 demos that show off some of the new HTML5 features and also demonstrating performance gains achieved with the help of a rewritten JavaScript engine and GPU-accelerated graphics. A bookstore demonstration from Amazon’s website, built using the HTML5 Canvas feature, is particularly impressive with its ability to open a book and flip through its pages, and another third-party demo from IMDb.com does a nice job of highlighting video playback. You’ll find a few frivolous demos as well (swimming fish and even a Potato Gun game) that show off some serious features.
The real proof, of course, will come when independent testers compare the new IE9 build to Safari 5 and Google Chrome using not only Microsoft’s test pages, but Apple’s test pages and those from third-party sites as well. Microsoft is sticking firmly with the goals it outlined back in November when it first demoed IE9 at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. The “same markup” mantra is still at the center of Microsoft’s design, with the goal of delivering a final release that has the best, most interoperable support for HTML5. The core design principle is that HTML5 markup will render the same in IE9 as it does in any other modern, standards-compliant browser, with no compromises in performance, and developers won’t have to treat it as a separate platform or version.
Update 23-Jun 3PM PDT: I just downloaded and installed the IE9 PP3 code and loaded the Amazon Shelf test page in IE9 and in the current shipping release of Google Chrome, on a system with an i7-920 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce 9600GS. Performance is blazing fast on the IE9 platform, with crisp transition effects and very snappy loads. On Chrome, which does not support GPU acceleration, performance is almost unbearably slow, and font rendering is inferior as well. Be sure to check the source code, which notes that the page is primarily driven by JavaScript and Canvas. There’s an equally dramatic performance difference on the IMDb Video Panorama page.
