Microsoft said Thursday it will launch the first public beta of Internet Explorer 9 at an event in San Francisco next month. The goal is to show off new online experiences enabled by the software giant’s next-generation web browser, which delivers “a more beautiful web that feels native on Windows,” Microsoft said.
Earlier this month, Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch noted that IE9 started from the premise that the Internet will soon be delivering HTML5 experiences that feel more like native applications than web sites.
“Building on hardware-accelerated SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], canvas, video, audio and text, developers will use the power of the whole PC to achieve great performance,” Hachamovitch wrote in a blog. “On the modern web, developers will use the same markup across different HTML5 browsers.”
Positive Developer Response
Microsoft’s event on Sept. 15 will mark the first time that IE9 will be available in a public beta release. Developers, designers and Microsoft’s partners have already been paying close attention to the four IE9 previews that Microsoft has launched so far.
The latest platform preview of IE9 introduced earlier this month shows off the capabilities of fully hardware-accelerated HTML5. “The performance benefits of hardware acceleration are clear from running different sample sites side by side in IE9 and other browsers,” Hachamovitch wrote. “IE9 offers consistent, fully hardware-accelerated text, graphics and media, both audio and video.”
IE9’s integration of HTML5 with full hardware acceleration is clearly a first step and it is good for Microsoft to be behind HTML5, noted Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC. A whole new browser generation is coming to market “with better implementation of HTML5,” but almost all have partial implementations, Hilwa said. So the battle is definitely on to see “who has the most extensive implementations.”
When it comes to HTML5’s video…