The Members Forum

ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley was lucky enough to see a Russian Microsoft IE9 page when it was apparently up for testing purposes. She grabbed a screenshot, revealing for the first time the new face of IE9, just before Microsoft took down the site again and replaced it with the preview information. Google’s cache was quick as well and eliminated traces of the spicy page, but Yahoo was nice enough to keep the page online and let us know what IE9 will bring.

Granted, it is just a marketing page we would have preferred the release notes instead. However, it went into a bit more detail of IE9 than what we have known so far. IE9 has not just a faster JavaScript engine and integrated hardware acceleration and if you expected the old iE8 interface to return - as I did as well – you were wrong. So let’s look.

Microsoft says there are five major new features:

• HTML 5 support
• Reduced Interface
• More Performance
• App Tabs for the Taskbar
• Aero Snap

HTML 5 support is a no brainer as IE8 isn’t really a HTML 5 browser according to WhenCanIuse.com or HTML5test.com. IE8 supports only 27% of HTML5 features, while IE9 is believed to reach 81%, according to WhenCanIUse.com. In comparison, Firefox 4 is expected to be at 96%, Chrome 7 at 96% and Opera 10.7 at 77%. In HTML5test.com, IE9 currently scores 82 of 300 points, while Chrome 7 is at 235 and Firefox 4 Beta 5-pre at 213 (we were not able to convince the current Firefox nightly build to run this test.) Conceivably, IE9 is doing much better than IE8, but we will have to wait if it is enough and if it will turn out as the same disaster when Microsoft said it would make IE8 standards compliant and it fell behind in the Acid 3 test. Right now, IE9’s HTML 5 features are not enough to match its rivals. Nevertheless, Microsoft says that IE9 has added “many features” for HTML5, CSS3, DOM L2 and L3, SVG, and ECMAScript5 – and the company is participating in standardization groups with the W3C.

The IE8 interface is history and given recent developments, it is about time. If you will, you can call the new UI “chromified”. It seems as if Google has set the standard for every other browser maker and everyone now seems to believe that a reduced interface translates into more performance – perceived performance, that is. There is some truth to that and we are now left with browsers that try to put their unique touch to a navigation bar with very few options. In IE9, the menu bar was deleted. There is now a back button, a forward button, the URL bar, the search bar, a home button, a bookmark button and a mystery button, which I believe to be a stop/reload button. The content of the navigation bar now reflects the features of Chrome 7 - Microsoft is just interpreting it a bit differently. There are some smaller, more subtle changes as well: For example, Microsoft has removed the 2-pixel frame inside the content window that has infuriated so many web designers who worked with absolute positioning of content across the different browser platforms.

Tom's Hardware has the entire article HERE!