IE9 Platform Preview #4

Posted Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 9:33 am by Jason Cartwright

The latest version of the IE9 preview is now available. Every previous version has been better than the last with improved scores on popular speed and compliance tests. This version scores 95/100 in the ACID3 test, the best of any version of IE so far.

Changes in IE9 Preview 4 are:

• JavaScript performance gains;
• Increased support for standards resulting in an improved Acid 3 score;
• Additional tests submitted to the working groups at the W3C;
• New developer samples the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive site;
• New samples across performance, graphics and HTML5;

Microsoft say “Browsing is the #1 thing people do on their PCs, but today’s browsers can only tap into less than 10% of a PC’s computational power.  IE9 uses the power of the whole PC to unlock the next class of experiences for the Web, delivering a powerful, rich, responsive, fast and interactive browsing experience.”

This is also the last preview for developers prior to the IE9 public beta. Unfortunately there’s still no UI, so we’ll have to wait for the beta to see that.

Hotfixes

I did have an issue installing this latest preview, it required some hotfixes to be installed first. After I took care of that, the install worked fine.

Available @ http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/