Microsoft announced that it is shipping the final technology preview of Internet Explorer (IE) 9 — the last pre-beta release of the company’s new browser before it hits public beta testing next month.
Called the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has shipped a series of pre-beta releases of IE9 since March in an effort to get webmasters, site developers and designers to buy in early to the testing process.
Microsoft said the previous three platform previews were downloaded a total of 2.5 million times.
“Developers have had an earlier (and more frequently updated) look at the platform [and] with that early engagement, developer feedback has had a bigger impact than before,” Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for IE, said in a post to Microsoft’s IEBlogWednesday.
Microsoft COO Kevin Turnertold analysts gathered at the company’s headquarters last week for its annual financial analysts meeting that the public beta of IE9 will begin in September.
The company released IE8 in March 2009. In that release, Microsoft attempted to bring IE into closer alignment with existing Web standards in response to repeated criticisms that earlier versions lacked such compliance.
Going forward, Microsoft has been striving to bring IE9 into even closer compliance with Web standards.
However, standards support notwithstanding, at the top of Microsoft’s list is the need to increase the browser’s performance.
For instance, native JavaScript support has been integrated into IE9. The fourth Platform Preview moves the new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, inside IE9 and brings them together into a single, integrated system, Hachamovitch said.
Running the Webkit.org SunSpider tests, IE9’s performance with the new JavaScript engine is 11 times faster than IE8, a company spokesperson said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.
Additionally, Platform Preview 4 now features fully hardware-accelerated HTML5 support.
“IE9 offers consistent, fully hardware-accelerated text, graphics, and media, both audio and video [which] demonstrates what HTML5 canvas can do when it’s fully accelerated with the GPU,” Hachamovitch added.
In the area of standards compliance, Microsoft’s developers boosted IE9’s performance on the Acid3 measurement test over the previous release. Platform Preview 3, which was released in late June, scored 83 out of 100 points on the test.
Microsoft said the Platform Preview 4 brings IE9’s Acid3 score to 95 out of 100.
The software giant also said it has submitted an additional 519 test cases to various standards bodies bringing the total number of tests it has submitted so far to 2,138.
With IE9, Microsoft hopes to reverse the declining use of IE in recent years. In July, the company pointed to minor gainsin user share for the past three months as evidence that such a turnaround has begun to occur, though whether that proves out or not remains to be seen.
As of the end of July, IE had a total market share of 60.74 percent of users, according to data from Web analytics firm Net Applications.
IE9 is due out next year.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020
AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.