Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Shows Sneak Preview Of Internet Explorer 9

"A publicly available platform preview demonstrates Microsoft's strides toward speed, compatibility and new features. Unimpressed as we may have been when Microsoft released a final build of Internet Explorer 8 a year ago, the company hasn't stopped toiling away on the most popular browser in the world. And it's ready to show off what its software engineers have been hard at work on over the past year. On Tuesday, Microsoft allowed developers to peek through blinds into its R&D labs with the release of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview."

As the battle of web browsers continues unabated, Microsoft have set up a website where you can get a glimpse at their next incarnation of Internet Explorer. Microsoft are planning to make a number of new changes to IE9 including a new faster Java engine, HTML5 support, and allowing the web page rendering engine to utilise your graphics card processor to render your page, rather than your CPU. This, in theory, should make the whole web browsing experience much faster as it makes use of a resource in your PC that isn't really used much when you are web surfing. I look forward to seeing some real world tests of this feature and how it actually performs compared to existing browsers.