Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) is the upcoming version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It is currently in development, but developer previews have been released.

E9 will have complete or nearly complete support for all Css 3 selectors, border-radius CSS 3 property, faster JavaScript, and embedded ICC v2 or v4 colourprofiles support via Windows Color System. IE9 will feature Hardware-accelerated graphics rendering using Direct2D, hardware accelerated text rendering using Directwrite, hardware accelerated video rendering using Media Foundation, imaging support provided by windows Imaging Component, and high fidelity printing powered by the XPS print pipeline. IE9 also supports the HTML5 video and audio tags and the web OpenFont Format

"The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases," said Dean Hachamovich, the browser team's general manager, in a statement issued today before he took the stage at MIX10, Microsoft's Web developer conference, to publicly launch IE9. IE 9 Platform Preview is far from polished, or even finished, Microsoft acknowledged, which is why it has slapped the moniker on the release, a first for IE.

"While it loads and renders Web pages using the Internet Explorer 9 platform, it is not designed to be a complete Web browser," Microsoft said in a fact sheet that accompanied the preview's announcement. "This build is simply a first look at the work Microsoft has done so far and is ready to share with its developer community."

"Internet Explorer 9 requires the modern graphics and security underpinnings that have come since 2001, and is intended to be run on a modern operating system in order to build on the latest hardware and operating system innovations," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail reply toComputerworld's questions Tuesday morning.

IE9, which Microsoft again touted for its performance gains,Taps the PC’s graphic processor to boost text and graphics rendering speeds using the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs (application programming interfaces). Support for those APIs is built into Windows 7, and added to Vista and Server 2008 R2 with the October 2009 Platform Update.

Unlike full-fledged editions of IE, the IE9 Platform Preview does not replace existing versions of IE -- such as IE7 on Vista or IE8 on Windows 7 -- but runs alongside them on the same PC.