Although, Microsoft officials have not yet shared the release date of the final version of IE 9, the first publicly available beta version is already here, generating a lot of buzz. IE 9 promises many improvements over its predecessors including extensive HTML 5 support, simplified interface and much better download manager but certainly one of the most talked about features is speed. IE 9 utilizes hardware acceleration to render content faster than ever. IE 9 will no doubt grow in popularity next year and web developers should be looking into its new feature list. Here is a quick rundown:
- Enhanced CSS3 support
- Rounded corners via the border-radius property
- CSS3 background and border features
- The opacity property
- RGBA, HSL, and HSLA color models
- CSS3 fonts properties and new web font formats
- CSS3 media queries
- CSS3 namespaces
- CSS3 values and units
- CSS3 selectors
- Improved DataURI support
- Document Object Model (DOM) Improvements
- Enhanced DOM capabilities
- Parsing and serializing XML to and from the DOM
- New DOM Level 2 (L2) and Level 3 (L3) support and updated behaviors
- DOM Core (L2, L3) and Views (L2)
- DOM Element Traversal
- DOM Events (L2, L3)
- DOM L2 HTML
- DOM L2 Style
- DOM L2 Traversal and Range
- New whitespace handling behavior
- ECMAScript feature enhancements
- Added HTML5 support
- The video and audio elements
- The canvas element
- The Selection interface
- Improved parsing of HTML elements
- Text selection APIs
- ICC v2 and v3 color profile support on images
- New Selectors API Level 2 support for the msMatchesSelector method
- SVG features
- Basic shapes: rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polylines, and polygons
- Clipping, masking, and compositing
- Coordinate systems, transforms, and units
- Document structure, metadata, and extensibility functionality
- Gradients and patterns
- Interactivity
- Linking and views
- Painting and color
- Paths, including full capabilities of the path element and d attribute
- Text
- Additional platform versioning capabilities
- Pinned sites
- New document mode
- New user-agent (UA) string
- Developer Tools additions
- Performance improvements
- Console tab
- Network tab
- UA switcher tool
- Real-world performance measurement
If you are interested in learning more about IE 9 or wish to give it a try go visit IE 9 test drive site at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
