Microsoft To Show Off IE9 Beta Next Month

Microsoft has built IE9 with the expectation that HTML5 will blur the line between Websites and native applications, and the company has built numerous enhancements in the forthcoming release.

"Developers are already working hard on some amazing new web experiences enabled by Internet Explorer 9," said James Pratt, product manager on the IE9 team, in a Thursday blog post.

Microsoft has been trumpeting IE9's speedy, hardware-accelerated HTML 5 rendering for the past several months, often by pitting IE9 against Firefox and Google's Chrome browser in handling graphically intensive Websites. However, critics have pointed out the selective nature of Microsoft's testing and noted that all of its competitors are also working on hardware fueled HTML5 rendering.

So far Microsoft has dished up over 2.5 million downloads of the four IE9 platform previews, the most recent of which was released in early August.

IE9 comes with a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that boosts the speed and performance of IE9 by compiling Javascript in a separate background thread while Windows runs in parallel on separate CPU core. Microsoft has also integrated the JavaScript engine natively in IE9, something it sees as crucial to being able to deliver superior performance.

"How a JavaScript engine is integrated into the browser is as important as the engine itself for real-world HTML5," Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this month.

At an event in June heralding the arrival of the third IE9 platform preview, Microsoft showed SunSpider Javascript benchmark testing results in which IE9 handily beat Chrome 4 and the current shipping version of Firefox, completing a data crunching test in 347 milliseconds.

Microsoft has also confirmed HTML Canvas tag support in IE9 as well the availability of HTML audio and video tags, and showed its growing adherence to Web standards by noting that IE9's Acid3 score jumped from 68 to 83 since the previous developer preview.