Six weeks ago we released the 3rd Internet Explorer Platform Preview as part of the commitment we made at MIX10 to release updated platform previews approximately every 8 weeks. Today, we’re releasing the 4th Internet Explorer Platform Preview and with that sending the signal to partners and developers that now is the time to start getting their sites ready for Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

With this latest platform preview we’ve updated the demos on the Internet Explorer Test Drive site to give you a sneak peak of the sort of web experiences developers will be able to deliver on Internet Explorer 9.

Our new open and transparent approach with the platform previews has been invaluable for getting early and quality feedback from developers. As with previous platform previews, our focus remains on:

• Enabling the same markup to work across browsers
• Delivering all-round performance
• Through Windows and modern hardware, unlocking the next class of experiences for the web with hardware acceleration

Developers and partners have been excited to experience the new IE9 web development and design capabilities, including fully hardware accelerating all graphics and text through Windows, our new Chakra JavaScript engine, as well as our support for modern standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM. We’ve received more than 1,300 pieces of feedback from developers and made many changes as a result.

Dean Hachamovitch goes into much more detail about Internet Explorer Platform Preview 4 over on the IE Engineering Blog.

We’re delighted with the response from the developer community to the platform previews and – as Dean mentions– we have seen over 2.5M downloads of the Internet Explorer Platform Previews and over 20M visits to the Internet Explorer Test Drive site.

Between now and the Beta, we encourage developers to test their web sites with PP4 to make sure well they’ll work with the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and begin to reimagine what they can build when they have a browser that is architected to take advantage of your hardware through Windows.

If you want to try it for yourself, you can visit the Internet Explorer Test Drive site, download Internet Explorer Platform Preview 4 and try some of the new demos like IE Beatz, Psychedelic Browsing and Hamster Dance Revolution.



Last night I spent some time with IE Beatz and came up with this beat. If you can do better – and I’m sure you can – why not post in the comments!

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