Hello ie9 Beta, originally uploaded by benaston.
Like an old friend with bad breath that you don’t really keep in contact with any more, Internerd Explorer 9 Beta has showed up, gingerly poking his head around the door to say – ‘I’ve cleaned my teeth’. And he’s not lying. All the demos in ie9 are very impressive; they use the mmmmputer graphics card power and conjure up all kinds of shenanigans with css3 and html5. Looks nice too – feels more Chrome than Firefox but like someone’s tidied up the house a bit.
After the excitement of the demos which show you how a browser using all your PC’s power is super-duper, download the ie9 beta and give it a try. You’ll see it might be a bit faster and focussed on performance, but when it comes to really demanding sites, how many sites at the moment that you go to, actually need the processing power to create a fishIE tank? I couldn’t think of any either.
But the GPU powered HTML 5 and CSS3 is pretty. Border radius, Web fonts and Canvas pad all look like they’ll become good friends.
Ahead of its time? Mmmicrosoft? Internet Explorer 9?
Maybe.