Windows Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is available for download

Today I am very busy dealing with some kind of load tests, but besides I got a very exciting news, Microsoft has announced a platform preview application for the next generation web browser for the Windows operating system – Windows Internet Explorer 9.

Internet Explorer 9 enhances the browser capability for the next generation web standards, including support for CSS 3 selectors, HTML 5 DOM, styling and events as well as JavaScript performance improvements. Currently Internet Explorer 9 is in the development progress controlled by the Windows team, however, a platform preview for IE 9 is available on today’s MIX 10 meeting. You can get this application from this web site: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Default.html.

The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is not a real browser replacement for your installed browsers, it is an application that can render IE 9 standard DOM based web pages. The full functionalities are not complete yet, only a few part of core features are ready to test so far. So just use this application to test JavaScript performance, CSS 3 selectors, new DOM events, SVG images or just download it to play around.

Here are some core features of IE 9:

• CSS 3 Selectors: Now IE 9 supports CSS 3 new selectors, including “::selection”, and new syntax for the node selectors.
• HTML 5 Document Object Model (DOM): IE 9 currently supports new Events object, addEventListener(), removeEventListener() methods as well as a set of custom events DOM objects. meanwhile, IE 9 adds methods to the style property of DOM elements to dynamically add/remove CSS rules and style sheet values.
• SVG: IE 9 supports SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) which brings a complicated and rich image experience to the web applications. For example, you may use SVG images to build a T-shirt color picker web page before your customer can proceed to check out.
• Hardware Graphics Acceleration: IE 9 is using DirectWrite and Direct3D to accelerate the image and the text rendering. This will improve the web page rendering performance a lot.
• JavaScript performance optimization: IE 9 has a new JavaScript execution engine that improves the JavaScript performance in ten times. Now IE 9 is running JavaScript a little faster then Firefox 3.6.

Here is a screenshot running the IE 9 Flying Images sample.

Enjoy. :)