Test Drive The New Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 has just been rolled in as a preview on Microsoft Test Drive site. It is just an early preview of Internet Explorer 9 platform. A lot of features are still incomplete and thus Internet Explorer 9 can not be used as a full fledge browser. Let’s take a look at some of the new features that are being added to Internet Explorer 9.

Internet Explorer 9 is speedy as it takes full advantage of your hardware with background compiled Javascript. Internet Explorer 9 supports the latest HTML5 web standards. Another advancement in Internet Explorer 9 is the graphics quality. IE 9 supports GPU powered HTML5 graphics which dramatically improves the graphics quality and visual experience.

Let’s look at the benchmarks of Internet Explorer 9. The first one is WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results. The lower the better. Just see the improvement from IE 8. It’s amazing.

Acid test is a popular test to measure the browser’s web standards compliance. Unfortunately IE 9 Preview seems to fail this test.

The CSS3 .info Selectors Test measures a browser’s support for CSS3 Selectors. IE 9  passes these selector tests.

Internet Explorer 9 requires atleast Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7. So it can not be run on Windows XP. Internet Explorer 9 pre-requisites include that Internet Explorer 8 and DirectX2D must be installed on the system where IE 9 has to be installed.

To have a more detailed preview what Internet Explorer 9 can do for you, just go to this Microsoft Test Drive site and install a preview of IE 9.