Today, at the Professional Developers Conference, we announced Internet Explorer Platform Preview 6 and shared the exciting news that we have had more than 10 million downloads of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta making Internet Explorer 9 our fastest adopted browser beta to date!
In the run up to Internet Explorer 9 Beta, we released a set of Platform Previews that allow developers to begin to imagine what their site would be like with a fully hardware accelerated browser that supported the same markup across browsers. With the Internet Explorer 9 Beta our partners showcased the new immersive experiences they were able to deliver, thanks to having those platform preview releases early. Clearly our customers are excited about the potential for the experiences unlocked by IE9 with more than 10M downloads to date.
With the release of Internet Explorer Platform Preview 6 developers can see some of the work we’ve done post-Beta, including supporting more standards like CSS3’s 2D transforms. Dean talks more about the work we’ve done over on the IE engineering blog but you can see some of the experiences enabled by Internet Explorer Platform Preview 6 in this video :
As you can see from the video, the difference between a fully hardware accelerated browser through Windows vs. a partial implementation can make a material difference to our experience on the web. Previously, we have shared some of the work that has gone into making IE9 all-around fast, but we thought it would be helpful to help provide an overview of what hardware acceleration really does for the browser. Here’s a concept video we put together for the Internet Explorer 9 Beta that should give you a sense of how hardware acceleration works.
If you haven’t yet, download IE9 Beta at http://beautyoftheweb.com and see first-hand what a fully hardware accelerated IE9 can enable.
Ryan
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