[LINK] IE9

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Microsoft Details Bold Aspirations for IE9

By Larry Barrett

<http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/webmaster/article.php/3871246>


LAS VEGAS -- A year removed from the debut of Internet Explorer 8, 
Microsoft released a platform preview of IE9 during the second day of its 
annual MIX10 developers conference, showcasing a version it promises will 
be consistent, powerful and long on HTML5 capabilities. 

"We saw how HTML5 enabled a whole new class of applications," Dean 
Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's IE group, told attendees 
here Tuesday. 

"We quickly realized to do it right, which is our intent, our focus was 
more around designing what HTML5 apps will need so they will feel more 
like real apps than Web pages." 

To make it happen, Microsoft is relying on high-performance graphics 
chips and other PC hardware to accelerate the delivery of graphics, video 
and text so developers can begin building the most powerful and rich 
applications possible in HTML5. 

"Developers, raise your expectations," Hachamovitch said. 

Of late, developers could have said the same thing to Microsoft's army of 
software engineers. 

While other browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome have 
quickly embraced HTML5 and SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics standard, 
Microsoft IE has fallen behind in HTML5 development and not 
coincidentally lost share to its largest browser competitors. 

But those days are over, according to Hachamovitch, as he all but begged 
the assembled audience of developers to stop writing code for the ancient 
and security-deficient IE6 browser and start writing apps for IE8, 
promising that all apps will be supported by IE9 once it's released 
sometime in 2011. 

Hachamovitch joked that there was an IE6 "funeral" held recently in 
Denver but "the IE9 team couldn't make it. We sent flowers." 

"We've built Internet Explorer 9 from the ground up, on top of the 
Windows 7 platform," Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows 
division, said during a demo. 

"We're all in." 

IE9 will have support for CSS3, the style sheet language used to describe 
presentation semantics of documents written in markup language, and for 
SVG 1.1 imagery inline. 

Hachamovitch said Microsoft will update the browser code every eight 
weeks until it releases a beta version at some undetermined date down the 
road. 

It will include new Web standards such as plug-in-free video and a new 
JavaScript engine called Chakra that will compile data in the background 
to improve performance without changing pages or code. 

Microsoft showed off the early iteration of IE9, running a series of 
graphics-rich demos that showed its new browser was faster than its 
competitors. 

Speaking of competitors, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at 
Mozilla, was gracious enough to tweet some encouraging words during the 
keynote address, saying "IE9 looks great, very glad to see it." 

Microsoft also announced plans to improve the development of new features 
and enhancements in the open source jQuery JavaScript Library, and will 
share the releases of new software development kits for the Open Data 
Protocol (OData) to help make life a little easier for developers looking 
to access data from the cloud to build cross-platform Web apps. 

The company also said it will promote and distribute versions of the 
jQuery JavaScript Library in its Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 
offerings. 

Attendees appeared to be particularly pleased when Microsoft announced 
the second Community Technology Preview (CTP) of "Dallas," an information 
marketplace powered by the Windows Azure platform that gives developers 
access to third-party data sets that can be consumed by Web and mobile 
applications. 

With more than 30 data sets now available from content providers such as 
Weather Central and Zillow.com, developers have an opportunity to sell 
their applications through "Dallas." 

Also, Microsoft reiterated that it plans to release Visual Studio 2010 
and the updated .NET framework sometime next month. 

Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of 
Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. 

--

Cheers,
Stephen