The Internet explorer development team has announced that they are working copy of their upcoming browser will better support web design standards and CSS 3. You can find their announcement on the MSDN blog.
They announced improved performance in the browser. Improved performance will come as a result of graphics acceleration from the graphics card; this is technology similar to the same graphics acceleration found in Photoshop C4 and Apple’s Final Cut Studio 3.The following graphic indicates results from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests created by the Apple Web Kit team.
IE9 Benchmark test results from MSDN blogThe upcoming browser will have better compliance for CSS standards including new standards for CSS three. Their blog demonstrates compliance when running the Web standards Project (WaSP) acid 3 test.
IE9 Acid3 test results from MSDN blogI Acid3 tested several Mac browsers.
Safari 4 Mac
Firefox 3.5.5 Mac
Opera 10 MacThe WaSP web site states that the Acid3 test Is mainly for checking the specifications for Web 2.0 Web applications. In addition there are some visual rendering tests, including Web fonts. They detail what is tested with the following:
- DOM2 Core
- DOM2 Events
- DOM2 HTML
- DOM2 Range
- DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, …)
- DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker)
- DOM2 Views (defaultView)
- ECMAScript
- HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, …)
- HTTP (Content-Type, 404, …)
- Media Queries
- Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic changes, …)
- XHTML 1.0
- CSS2 (@font-face)
- CSS2.1 (’inline-block’, ‘pre-wrap’, parsing…)
- CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), …)
- CSS3 UI (’cursor’)
- data: URIs
- SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, …)
I use many of the above scripting and coding bits on many web sites. It is very unfortunate that up until now Internet Explorer has not been standards compliant. I am glad that they are working so hard on Internet Explorer 9 so that it is more standards compliant.