Microsoft has recently updated a test release of its new Internet Explorer 9 browser with a seventh platform preview, this time showing off developer related enhancements in features like Java Script. Microsoft say that the new release which is available to download from the Internet Explorer Test Drive site, is geared up to provide ‘real-world’ performance improvements to sites across the web. Ke features include a new user interface and support from HTML5 and CSS3
These real world improvements were revealed by Dean Hachamovitch, corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, to be developments in Microsoft’s Java Script engine, Chakra. He stated that engineers have been tuning Chakra to corroborate more with the patterns found in real-world sites, observing attentively the way web sites actually use JavaScript in response to input from users, relocate objects and manipulate strings. What we might be asking though, is why weren’t these improvements, which sound more like commonsense than innovation, implemented much earlier.
Although Microsoft have again declined to announce even an approximate date of release for the new browser it is reported that there have been over 13 million downloads of IE 9 beta since it was released in mid-September.
What also transpired within the last few days was that Microsoft has already added stability fixes to the download. One update provides stability fixes and the second is said to address issues with the user feedback tool of Windows-Live-Essentials 11 on 64-bit machines.
Consumers have expressed particular appreciation for the new user interface in what have so far been largely developer based previews of the platform. Users with automatic updates can sit back and wait for the updates to be automatically installed. As for the short term future IE9, watch this space, insiders have stated that a launch could be set to coincide with the International Consumer Electronics Show in early January next year.