Right now, Internet Explorer lags behind the likes of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera in terms of features and speed. But that's just version 8. With IE9, Microsoft is working to make it the best browser available.
If you want to catch a glimpse at what Microsoft is doing for Internet Explorer 9, then you may want to try out the third platform preview of the upcoming browser.
Officially, the Internet Explorer Platform Preview is for developers who want to test the new Internet Explorer 9 web development and design capabilities, including the new JavaScript engine – codename Chakra – as well as support for standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM. It's not meant to be a mission critical browser application, but enthusiasts looking to test out something faster than what they're running now have the option to do so.
Early tests show that IE9 is indeed quite fast, even when compared up against the developer builds of Chrome 6 and Firefox 3.7. When it came down to it with HTML5 hardware acceleration, however, IE9 blew past Chrome 6 but Firefox 3.7 actually performed better. Check out Download Squad's test video for more.
The browser wars still continue, even in the unreleased format. The good news for all of us that we can use more than one browser at a time on our machines and this sort of competition will only help to improve our internet experiences.
If you're the adventurous type, download the preview. Be sure to check out the further reading from Microsoft below.
