Microsoft launches IE9 Platform Preview 7

SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has announced Internet Explorer (IE) 9 Platform Preview 7 with a focus on improving performance.

Mere weeks after bringing out its IE 9 Platform Preview 6, the Vole is already bringing us another Preview of IE9. With the use of Internet Exploder plummeting globally despite good word on our Beta IE9 review, , Microsoft hasn't got the luxury of time to waste.

But IE 9 Platform Preview 7 isn't a standards compliance release. It is specifically focused on how much real world speed the Vole's software engineers can eek out of the web browser.

"We first demonstrated the power of a fully hardware accelerated HTML 5 browser taking advantage of the full power of the hardware through Windows just 8 months ago," blogged Microsoft's Ziad Ismail.

"We now couple that with dramatic performance gains in Chakra, Microsoft's Javascript engine," he added.

Ismail reckoned that this iteration of IE9 is now the leading performer in the Javascript micro-benchmarking software Webkit Sunspider with a 345 per cent increase in performance. That is hundreds of times faster than IE8.

Ismail claimed that IE9's Chakra engine is tweaked to deliver performance gains. He also said that Webkit Sunspider, despite offering good results for Microsoft, only looks at small parts of one subsystem and "it doesn't reflect how subsystems perform together".

Instead, Ismail suggested that users test out other benchmarks like Galactic, HTML5 Sudoku and Shakespeare's Tag Cloud that engage multiple subsystems at once. Naturally, he wouldn't bother to point these out if IE9 bombed with bad results and, would you Adam and Eve it, they just happen to be Microsoft's own web browser benchmarking tools. µ