Thread: Check out the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview Number 2!

Back at MIX in March, we released the first Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview. We said we were committed to releasing an Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview update every 8 weeks. Well, today we’re making good on that promise and even a little ahead of schedule! Today we are releasing Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2. You can grab the new Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview it by visiting the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive website.



Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, has posted to the IEBlog about Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2. He dives a little deeper into a lot of the improvements that was made to Internet Explorer 9’s performance and support for standards and talks about the feedback we’ve received so far.

These Platform Previews for Internet Explorer 9 are designed specifically for web designers in mind and focused primarily around same markup and what that means for developers. These Platform Previews for Internet Explorer 9 are not betas. There is intentionally no UI – not even a back button or an address bar – and they’re designed to be able to run side by side with your regular browser. That being said, for those of you who are like me who and are not developers but want to see first-hand the investments we’re making with Internet Explorer 9 in terms of speed and performance: Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 introduces several new demos definitely worth checking out. Take a look at the following video from Channel 9 showing some of the demos:



I thought I would highlight a couple of my favorite new demos. One of the new demos is called Flickr Explorer. I liked this demo because it highlights how the Flickr APIs and their technology in combination with the platform improvements we’re making with Internet Explorer 9 can create some really cool web experiences.



Another good demo to check out is Browser Flip. Move your mouse over the hexagons and different browser logos will appear.



Both these demos showcase the frames per second (FPS) and time. You can run them in other browsers to see how they stack up. It’s certainly very interesting to see the comparisons. Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview has several other new demos including Scrolling Text, CSS3 Media Queries, and SVG Tweet Cloud.

If you’re interested, give Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 a try! It runs side-by-side to your default browser.

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It will be interesting to see how IE9 goes, as well as FF4 coming out soon.