I’ve been seeing a lot of headlines about Internet Explorer 9 lately and now I have a chance to throw my two cents in. Last month Microsoft revealed its plans around IE9, the next version of THE browser in terms of market share.
It is supposed to have:
- support for HTML5 and CSS3
- faster JavaScript engine
- GPU rendering (Direct2D on Vista, Windows 7)
HTML5, CSS3, faster JavaScript
At first, all those 3 things seem like “hey, why do we need them?”. I agree that web, even without those advanced features works for now and many don’t see any reason why we should invent something new. Well, I partially agree, but we must keep in mind that many of us – users and web developers don’t see the true benefits of new standards and improved JavaScript performance.
And why is that so?
Because web developers can’t use it. Internet Explorer, the most used browser in the world doesn’t support CSS3, majority of HTML5 and is damn slow at JavaScript compared to others. As such, any attempt of using new standards or creating nice GUI’s or fancy stuff with JavaScript causes that more than 50% of users have an impaired user experience.
Version 9 promises to fix those issues and help web move forward – to the future. Will Microsoft keep their promise? I surely hope so!
GPU rendering
I always liked the idea of moving heavy computational tasks and rendering to the GPU, but after Microsoft announced this to be in IE9, I thought “wooow, don’t you have many other things to fix first?”, however, after seeing that they will improve other areas I thought of it as a good idea. I sincerely hope that Microsoft will successfully implement this and as it currently looks, it might beat the competition (Mozilla is planning this for 3.7 and Opera’s last info about this was two years ago).
Well, Microsoft… I wish you luck and I hope you keep your promise.