Internet Explorer 9: An Early Look

03.16.10

We finally got to take an early version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 browser engine out for a spin.

In early testing, IE9 impresses.

by Michael Muchmore

Speed and standards. Those two words sum up the goals of Microsoft's just-released Platform Preview of its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser. I have to stress that there's a good reason for calling it a "platform preview" rather than a "beta"—the code you can download from ie.microsoft.com/testdrive is not a full browser program by a long shot—there's no Back button, let alone bookmark manager, history feature, toolbars, or any of the other features we've come to expect in modern Web browsers. So this hands on will be shorter than most, simply because there's not much in the way of "user interface" or other goodies to talk about. But there's still plenty to look at in terms of performance and standards support. And, from what we can see so far, it looks like Microsoft is on the right track.

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The first thing you notice (beside download links) when you go to the home page for the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview are links to speed and standards tests both from Microsoft and from the outside world. That's noteworthy, since the previous versions of the browser weren't known for speed or adherence to standards. So, that's a hopeful sign. And, in fact, the first results of my testing yielded impressive advances over Internet Explorer 8 in both performance and standards support. Most sites load more snappily than in IE8, and in some cases than in IE's competitors. But this engine can't claim top honors in performance and standards support just yet. Chrome and Opera still lead on a popular JavaScript benchmark, and Firefox supports more HTML 5, at the moment.

Internet Explorer 9: Speed
Microsoft is attacking performance on a few fronts in Internet Explorer. Not only has Microsoft's team rewritten the JavaScript engine to bring that subsystem's performance in line with that of competing browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, but they're using a second core in multicore CPUs (pretty much every PC sold today has a multicore CPU) to compile JavaScript in parallel. Granted, other browsers have done a tremendous job with JIT (just-in-time) compilation of JavaScript, but using the second CPU core is a new twist that makes a lot of sense, and it benefits from Microsoft's knowledge of Windows 7's use of multiple cores.

The standard test that tech reviewers use is the WebKit open source project's SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. But a few caveats are in order before anyone takes the results on these tests as the gospel on JavaScript performance. Even some of the most commonly called-upon JavaScript commands are not included in the tests. But they do show something about performance—anyone who's used Chrome knows it's significantly faster than IE7, and its SunSpider number is an order of magnitude faster. All that said, here are my results, using a 2-GHz Athlon AMD 64 X2-based PC with 2GB RAM, with all unnecessary processes shut down via Task Manager.

Browser SunSpider JavaScript
Benchmark result
(in milleseconds—lower is better)
Firefox 3.6 1,405
Google Chrome 4.0 749
Internet Explorer 7 47,119
Internet Explorer 8 9,015
Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 1,310
Opera 10.5 577
Safari 4.0 790
As you can see, the improvement from IE7 to IE8 to IE9 is remarkable. While Chrome, Opera, and Safari still lead by a good margin, the number-two browser Firefox is now in IE's rear-view mirror.

But there's more to performance than SunSpider. The Testdrive site for IE9 has a slew of demos that show fast, smooth performance for things like resizing fonts, zooming around maps, and "pulsating bubbles." This speed boost comes from Internet Explorer 9's use of graphics hardware to accelerate image and display operations. The map test uses Bing Maps, but I also tried Google Maps in IE8, IE9, and the current SunSpider leader Opera, as well as in Google's own Chrome browser. The IE9 preview did indeed handle satellite maps and text labels faster than the competition.

One of the most impressive demonstrations of IE9's hardware acceleration is the Flying Images test. Here, 3D icons spin in formation, and the tester can increase the number of icons, their size, and their speed. IE9 consistently maintained above 60 frames per second refresh rate, while SunSpider leader Opera slowed down to 15 fps when I increased the number of icons and zoomed in. One test tool I was sorry to see not included in the test site was one that timed the top 15 or so most popular JavaScript commands; at Microsoft's campus I noted that IE9 was twice as fast as Opera on this. I would really have liked to be able to replicate these results for myself.

Internet Explorer 9: Standards Compliance
A big thrust of Internet Explorer 9 is support for some emerging HTML 5 standards. High on everybody's lists among these are support for the Video and Audio tags. These tags allow playing of those media types directly from the browser, as opposed to needing a plug-in such as Adobe's Flash Player to do so. An advantage to Microsoft's implementation over that in Firefox is that IE9 will support industry-standard MPEG-4 and H.264, rather than the laudably royalty-free but little-used Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats supported by Firefox. It's noteworthy that the dominant leader in Internet video, YouTube, uses H.264 in its HTML 5 test site.

Unfortunately, this first build of IE9's platform doesn't yet implement the HTML video, audio, or canvas tags. The last one allows drawing within a Web page, and is already supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Another problem with support for these tags: A lot of sites test for your browser, so if they see you're using Internet Explorer (any version), you get an alternate page telling you that your browser doesn't support HTML 5 video, even if it does. Microsoft's IE general manager, Dean Hachamovitch (who Lance Ulanoff interviewed on video), hopes developers will start testing for the capability, rather than for the browser, so that content will work across browsers. —next: SVG Video >

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