HTML5, Native: Third IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers

As developers experiment and begin the transition from writing today?s websites to building HTML5 applications, they will test the limits of browsers. For example, the huge difference between hardware accelerated HTML5 video and plain HTML5 video support in a browser was clear in the demo we showed at MIX.

Because some browsers run on many different operating systems, there can be a tendency to use a ?least common denominator? approach to implementing HTML5. By using more of the underlying operating system, and taking advantage of the power of the whole PC, IE9 enables developers to do more with HTML5. Running through Windows, instead of just on Windows, makes a big difference the web runs more like a native application. This is consistent with our approach of architecting HTML5 support in, from the ground up, rather than just grafting in some HTML5 features.

The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You?ll see more performance, same markup, and hardware accelerated HTML5.

This video of same markup running in IE9 and other browsers shows what hardware acceleration means for the new, graphically rich and interactive HTML5 websites to come from developers:

Note this video uses the HTML5 video tag (with the H.264 codec) if your browser supports it, and falls back to other methods otherwise. It?s a good example of same markup in action.

Performance through the power of the whole PC

Today, people expect less from a website than they do from native applications in terms of power, richness, responsiveness, and interactivity. With the third platform preview, we continue to deliver on the promise of a fully hardware accelerated browser where all of the support for text, graphics, and media uses the underlying hardware through Windows, making the full power of the PC available for the Web. Using the power of the whole PC shatters the previous constraints that limited websites.

JavaScript is one component of browser performance, and Webkit Sunspider is one measure of script performance. The latest platform preview shows how IE9?s JavaScript engine continues to get faster. Here?s the chart:

You see the progress with this zoomed-in chart, showing just the IE9 platform previews and the pre-release versions of other browsers:

Looking at the differences between the script engines? performance, you see the performance gaps between the fastest script engines are now less than 50 milliseconds ? and that?s executing several million script instructions during the benchmark test. This difference is already under any human perception threshold, and we?re not done yet.

Many sites spend lots of time in subsystems other than JavaScript. If browser performance were entirely attributable to JavaScript, the performance on the test drive site samples would look like the Webkit Sunspider graph that?s not the case. You can expect that we will continue to focus on real-world performance and not optimize for any specific benchmark.

Introducing hardware accelerated canvas, video and audio

With the third platform preview, we introduce support for the HTML5 Canvas element. As you know our approach for standards support is informed both by developer feedback and real word usage patterns today, along with where we see the web heading. Many web developers have asked us to support this part of HTML5 and we definitely took this feedback into account as we prioritized our work.

Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser. We?ve rebuilt the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web. These extensive changes to IE9 mean websites can now take advantage of all the hardware innovation in the PC industry.

Try the Asteroid Belt sample and Fish Tank sample on the test drive site to see hardware accelerated Canvas in action. Together with Amazon, we built a book shelf sample showing the potential for bringing the richness of hardware accelerated canvas into an interactive e-commerce experience.

Similarly, we partnered with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to build the Video Panorama sample to demonstrate the possibilities for bringing hardware accelerated HTML5 Video and graphics interactivity together to create new applications and experiences. Our focus is on delivering a complete, highly interoperable implementation of canvas, video, and audio that makes the most of the full power of the PC.

To help you better understand how these samples work, we created videos that provide a look ?under the hood? for Fish Tank, Amazon Shelf, and Video Panorama. As the browser uses more of the hardware, your experience depends on the hardware you have, just as it always has. With hardware accelerated graphics, the graphics card and driver combination play a significant role in how you experience the various examples and benchmarks.

The PC hardware ecosystem has made huge advances over the last few years. Today?s GPUs provide up to 10 times the computing power of CPUs, a clear trend in GPU processing power compared to CPU over recent years. Given how important the web is, our focus is making that power available to web developers. With IE9 developers can run the same, W3C standards-based markup as in other browsers ? just faster, taking advantage of the underlying hardware. The result of using the power of the whole PC to browse is a new class of web application without many of the limits on today?s sites.

The first two platform previews demonstrated hardware acceleration of text, images, and vector graphics. Preview 3 completes the media landscape for modern websites with hardware accelerated video, audio, and canvas. Developers now have a comprehensive platform to build hardware accelerated HTML5 applications. This is the first browser that uses hardware acceleration for everything on the web page, on by default, available today for developers to start using for their modern site development.

Same Markup

As we have said before, web browsers should render the same markup ? the same HTML, same CSS, and same script ? in the same way. That?s simply not the case today across many browsers and many elements of markup. Enabling the same markup to work the same across different browsers is as crucial for HTML5?s success as performance. Our investments in standards and interoperability are all about enabling the same markup to just work.