Latest IE9 Preview Aims for Standards Compatibility

July 1, 2010

Microsoft is shipping Platform Preview 3 (PP3) of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), which company officials say features improved performance in both compatibility test scenarios as well as real world tasks.

The latest platform preview adds support for HTML5 audio, video, and canvas tags along with support for ECMAScript, according to a post on Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) IEblog Wednesday afternoon by Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.

While IE9 hasn't even begun official beta testing yet, Microsoft's central focus on the next version of its browser so far is standards compatibility, which is likely to make life easier for Web site builders and designers when the product is finally released.

"With today's update to the platform preview, we have also updated the IE Testing Center, adding another 118 test cases which we are contributing to the appropriate web standards working groups at the W3C. In addition, we have written 1309 JavaScript test cases and are making those all available to the web development community," Hachamovitch's post said.

That includes scoring 83 out of 100 points on the Acid3 standards compatibility test -- up from 68 in PP2, which shipped in early May. In order to actually pass the set of tests embodied in Acid3, however, IE9 needs to score 100 out of 100, so the browser still has a ways to go.

Microsoft released PP1 in mid-March at the company's MIX10 Conference in Las Vegas. The company released IE8, the current version of IE, in March, 2009.

It hasn't even made it to beta test yet, but IE9 has already come in for its share of controversy....

Continue reading this article

Source: htmlgoodies.com