Microsoft has released the first Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9. Basically, the Platform Preview is not even alpha code. It's intended for developers only, not end users. In fact, most of the GUI features are not implemented (there's no address bar, no back button, no tab support, etc). Microsoft wants developers to use it on their sites, and then provide feedback on how well the render and javascript engines are performing. Updates are currently planned on an 8 week cycle.
From a standards and performance point of view, there are several interesting things about IE9. It uses a new scripting engine called Chakra, that is considerably faster than the IE8 engine. In fact, Microsoft claims that it is faster than Firefox, but still slower than Chrome and Opera. One of the things Chakra does is compile any javascript on a page to native code instead of running it in interpreted mode. Also, they've finally decided to adopt support for HTML5, including Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It appears this will finally kill off VML, which has been dead since 1998 but still included in IE.
IE9 will also off-load a lot of the graphical processing to the GPU. They can apparently leverage the Vista/Windows 7 graphics sub-system, and thus the GPU, to achieve much better performance for multimedia support. Oh, and it also includes native support for multiple cores. For instance, Chakra will background compile script code on a separate thread and core from the main IE9 process.
Naturally, no discussion in the article about security holes or patches, or anything they've done to make it more robust in that regard.
One of the things Chakra does is compile any javascript on a page to native code instead of running it in interpreted mode.
ReplyDeleteAt first, I had a heart attack at the security implications. Then I remembered we're talking about Javascript. Probably can't be much worse from a security perspective ...