IE 9 – What We Know

PDC 2009 is happening as I type, Scott Gutherie is demoing Silver Light 4, just before the Gu, Windows client and Server division president – Steven Sinofsky showed early build demo of Microsoft Internet Explorer’s next version – IE 9. So far according to Sinofsky, it’s only been 3 weeks into development and this here’s what we know:

1. Trident to continue as the rendering engine. (No Webkit)
2. IE 9 as of now has an ACID score of 32/100 (better than IE8)
3. CSS3 Support. Rounded corners coming to IE – final-fucking-ly.
4. Hardware (GPU) accelerated rendering

Microsoft’s Channel 9 has uploaded some videos on IE 9’s development, I’ve embedded them here:

D2D rendering in IE9:

Standards & Interoperability

Look at the JavaScript Engine:

Though the ACID score isn’t exceptional compared to the other browsers, the fact that Sinofsky brought it up and talked about it, I’m fairly certain that there’ll be some major improvements on this front.