The Mobile Test Drive site will work similar to the Internet Explorer 9 desktop version test drive site where various development samples will be published to highlight features and capabilities. Both the desktop and mobile versions of Internet Explorer 9 use the same core rendering engines and adhere to the concept of “same markup,” but the Microsoft team felt it was important to demonstrate how to optimize content for differences in screen size and device capabilities.

Additional samples will be posted to the site over the coming months leading up to the Windows Phone Mango release. But to start things off, the first 15 samples that will be available on the Mobile Test Drive will be:
– Audio Player (from MIX11)
– Geolocation
– Border Radius
– DOM Local Storage
– Scalable Vector Graphics
– CSS3 Media Queries
– DOMContentLoaded
– FishIE Tank
– Speed Reading (from MIX11)
– Animated Text
– HamsterDance Revolution
– Business Charts
– IE Logo
– Video Panorama
– Browser Control Theming

[via Windows Team Blog]

StatCounter reports that on the first day of FF 4′s release it scored higher globally than IE9 did on its first day. StatCounter said that by March 22 IE9 had only 0.87% of the global browser market. Internet Explorer still holds the vast majority of the browser market when all versions are taken into account.

IE with all versions combined currently has 45% of the market with Firefox having 30% and Chrome taking 17% globally. The US only results are much the same with 48% on IE, 26% on Firefox and 14% on Chrome.

Obviously only Windows users get to experience IE9, limiting Microsoft’s audience a little. The new app is fully hardware accelerated, with a Tracking Protection system that uses managed lists of trusted sites to attempt to control who has access to your information and surfing patterns.

However, Tracking Protection has already come in for criticism, with Which? pointing to issues IE9 has when using multiple TPL (tracking protection lists). In such a case, the browser amalgamates the TPL into a single list where “allow” is given priority over “block”; that could leave some users unprotected from certain sites.

This browser has been in production for approximately a year, and now they’re going to release it, thanking profusely the community of developers who have stepped up to help them in making this a platform that has a chance at competing with the rest of the powerhouse browsers out in the market today. As you know, Internet Explorer

Hachamovitch will be doing a keynote at MIX 10 as well, showing off how the platform is rolling out, as a sort of “look what we did in a year” sort of thing. These two fellas sitting on the couch are super excited about this rollout and after saying what they came to say, they made sure to prompt Channel9 for what they call an “uncomfortable question.” What Channel9 decided to ask about was HTML5, to which they reply “WE’RE FOR IT!”

Of course the developer community knows this already, so the question is pressed, beyond what HTML5 can do for the everyday user, what does IE9 offer the fringe users who want features that not everyone will use? Hachamovitch replies with a sort of well, we DO do that, we’ve implemented things like Navigation Timing which “got 0% usage on the web,” he then going on to say that they’ve added items that don’t just come from developers who request things, they’ve essentially come up with elements that they and people at Yahoo, Google, and etc have spoken about behind the scenes, bringing these “fringe” features into IE9 at launch.

Essentially what they’re speaking about in this video and what will be coming with Internet Explorer 9 is depth as well as quality implementation of features. We’re hoping for the best!

Brian Hall has been with Microsoft since 1995 and ran the worldwide launch of Windows XP and previously worked as a product manager of Windows 95, Windows 98, and Internet Explorer 3 through Internet Explorer 5. Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular web browser and Microsoft said Tuesday that 36 million copies of IE 9 beta since its release in September. The final milestone was launched on February 10th.

The biggest addition with the newest iteration of Internet Explorer is the Tracking Protection feature. It will give users the ability to block different ways of being tracked on the web including cookies, web beacons, trackers, and advertisements. The user can now also block ActiveX controls with “ActiveX filter”. The filter lets the user turn off the ActiveX while browsing.

With Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox bearing down on Internet Explorer, Microsoft is facing some stiff competition. You won’t find many people using Internet Explorer if they have one of those other options to use. Microsoft needs Internet Explorer to reclaim some of the market if it hopes to stem Chrome and Firefox from snatching up more users.

[via WinRumors]

Coming this March, the much needed copy-and-paste function will be implemented along with substantially improved performance, a better Marketplace interface, and CDMA support. The added CDMA support confirms plans for WP7 devices to be available through Verizon and Sprint in the first half of this year.

For the major update due later this year, Microsoft intends to introduce many new features including but not limited to multitasking similar to webOS’s card-based task switcher, the ability for third-party apps to run in the background, Internet Explorer 9, and Twitter integration into the People hub. Additional updates could be possible and further details on their SDK improvements will be revealed at the MIX 11 conference in April.

[Via ArsTechnica]

When it comes to the interface, IE 9 has a more svelte header area and features a “One Bar”–an all-in-one search and address bar similar to that of Google’s Chrome. The tabbed area, however, is aligned with the One Bar which may be a nuisance for folks who like to open a dozen tabs at the same time as they would have to either drag the tabs into a second row or shrink the width of the One Bar.

As for security and performance features, IE9′s new Tracking Protection is essentially the same as the previous InPrivate Filtering feature except with added functionality. It will automatically block tracking cookies, but also can be customized to block only the ones you select.

Improved support for HTML5, CSS3, and geolocation is also included in this release along with the ability to pin web apps to the taskbar.

[Via Download Squad]

Any Windows user, Microsoft insists, “should be able to play mainstream video on the Web.” As for WebM, Microsoft has apparently been working with Google engineers on an implementation for Windows.

“Our support for H.264 results from our views about a robust Web and video ecosystem that provides a rich level of functionality, is the product of an open standards process like the W3C’s HTML5 specification, and has been free from legal attacks. Microsoft is agnostic and impartial about the actual underlying video format for HTML5 video as long as this freedom continues” Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer

However, it’s not all hair-braiding and hopscotch; Hachamovitch also raises some questions about Google’s decisions and stances with regards to open standards, and asks if the search giant would “fully support” turning WebM into a true open platform, as with W3C’s HTML5. He also mentions the dreaded “fragmentation” word, suggesting that “the lack of consistency across devices, Web services, and the PC is a challenge for the community” and could have an impact on hardware acceleration among other things.

The nearest alternative was Internet Explorer 8, which blocked 90-percent. NSS Labs credit SmartScreen URL filtering, included in IE8 and IE9, for the strong showing; only IE9 has SmartScreen application reputation protection, however, hence the difference in results.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Safari 5 languished with 11-percent of threats blocked, Chrome 6 did even worse with 3-percent, and Opera 10 failed to block any of the downloads. Around 636 URLs were included in the testing, and interestingly – as shown in the following chart – despite both Safari 5 and Firefox 3.6 each using Google’s Safe Browser feed, the two apps seemingly implemented it in different ways.

“We designed this feature so that consumers have a clear, straight forward, opt-in mechanism to enable a higher degree of control over sharing their browsing information AND websites can provide easy to use lists to manage their privacy as well as experience full-featured sites.” IEBlog

Sites will be able to create their own TPLs with details on external URLs that are necessary for full functionality, and users will be able to optionally accept or deny those TPLs. Microsoft is positioning it as an opt-in system, partly in response to a recent report by the FTC which criticized industry self-regulation on privacy and suggested that it had “failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection.”

IE9 is due for release early in 2011, and Microsoft has given examples of the sort of coding required to put together TPLs so that websites can get up to speed in advance. Whether users will be willing to take a more active role in their privacy online remains to be seen, however.

In fact, where IE9 managed the standard math-cordic test in an impressive 1.0ms, when the tweaked versions were introduced it delivered scores around 20x slower. Similar tweaks to Chrome and Opera produced consistent results, as was expected.

Digitizor suggests that Microsoft has either optimized IE9 to return strong SunSpider results – which they say is “cheating” – or that the company’s engineers have been focusing too greatly on the benchmarking test and have over-optimized the JavaScript engine to suit its requirements. Alternatively, it could be a legitimate bug, and indeed Sayre has filed a bug form on Microsoft Connect.

[via Slashdot]

NVIDIA has a new video that it has tossed up over on YouTube. The video shows some of the green geeks playing with a couple notebooks running IE9. IE9 is optimized from the ground up to take advantage of a GPU for making things faster and smoother.

To illustrate the point in the video NVIDIA takes a pair of netbooks with one sporting next generation Ion and the other not. They run the machines side by side with IE9 installed and try to play a generic Asteroids style game. The non Ion machine lacks up and is slow while the Ion machine is fast and smooth. It’s a fairly impressive video.

In its current state, the new JavaScript engine vastly out-performs IE8, as you can see in the graph below.  It’s lagging behind Chrome, Safari and Opera 10.5 at the moment, but besting Firefox 3.6 (by a little, anyway), and we’re promised further improvements as they tweak the script.  Part of the way Microsoft are approaching JavaScript is to run it in a separate background thread from the main browser, even on a separate CPU core if available.  That takes better advantage of multi-core processors, a decent idea given many people spend most of the time in their browsers these days.

Now, this isn’t a full release of the new IE9 today, it’s the company’s “Platform Preview”, but there are still a few downloads you can try out if you’re developer-minded.  The IEBlog has several links, and they’re also promising to update the preview every eight weeks in the run up to the Release Client.  In fact, they’re being particularly honest about the current shortcomings of the latest build, which passes 55 out of 100 tests in benchmarking tool Acid3 (which tests for compliance with browser standards).  You can find the new Platform Preview build here.

Press Release:

Microsoft Announces Hardware-Accelerated HTML5, Pushes Boundaries on Web and Cloud Development

Microsoft releases first platform preview for Windows Internet Explorer 9, highlights commitments to jQuery and OData.

LAS VEGAS — March 16, 2010 — Industry standards and innovation took center stage at MIX10, as Microsoft Corp. made a series of announcements that underscore the company’s commitment to interoperability and performance on the Web. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, unveiled the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview including expanded support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text, and a new JavaScript engine. Together these allow developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications that take advantage of modern PC hardware through a modern operating system.

Microsoft also announced that it will contribute to the development of new features and enhancements in the jQuery JavaScript Library and shared the release of new software development kits (SDKs) for the Open Data Protocol (OData) that make it easier for developers to access data from the cloud to create more compelling cross-platform Web applications.

Raising Developer Expectations With Hardware Acceleration, Increased Interoperability

As part of its commitment to interoperability, Microsoft detailed its support for a number of HTML5 specifications, including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard (H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC) codecs, among others. In addition, Microsoft demonstrated a new JavaScript engine that uses the multiple cores of today’s modern chips to effectively manage computing resources and improve Web performance. By combining increased interoperability with a new JavaScript engine and Direct 2D technology, Internet Explorer 9 enables Web developers to provide users with richer experiences that render more quickly and consistently.

“I am very happy with Microsoft’s commitment to the HTML Working Group and to HTML5,” said Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C, Domain Leader.

“Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser to take standard Web patterns that developers use and run them better on modern PCs through Windows,” Hachamovitch said.

Starting at MIX10, developers also will be able to track Microsoft’s progress and provide direct feedback on the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview by evaluating new code refreshes approximately every eight weeks leading up to the beta release. Developers can download the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview at http://www.IETestDrive.com.

“Internet Explorer 9 enabling GPU-accelerated HTML5 is a milestone for visual computing,” said Drew Henry, general manager of GeForce and ION GPU business unit at NVIDIA Corp. “By harnessing the power of NVIDIA GPUs, Internet Explorer 9 removes the glass ceiling for Web developers, enabling them to build graphically rich, high-performing Web applications.”

Increased Support of Client Development Through the jQuery JavaScript Library

As part of Microsoft’s broad engagement with open source communities, Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie today announced that Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of standards-based Web applications. Microsoft will also work to provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will actively promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with popular products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify Web applications.

Creating Compelling User Experiences, Powered by the Cloud

To enable developers to build immersive, cross-platform Web and mobile applications that use data delivered from the cloud, Microsoft also released SDKs for OData, an HTTP and Atom-based approach to data portability, for a number of languages and platforms including .NET, Java, PHP, Objective-C (iPhone and Mac) and JavaScript. In addition, Microsoft announced the second Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft code-named “Dallas,” an information marketplace powered by the Windows Azure platform, which provides developers with access to third-party datasets that can be consumed by Web and mobile applications. By making content and data available with an OData feed via “Dallas,” developers can access and monetize their data under their terms and pricing, which can be can built into applications to deliver unique user experiences.

Today, developers can take advantage of more than 30 datasets from content providers, including NAVTEQ, Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Weather Central and Zillow.com, available on the “Dallas” information marketplace. Developers can access the OData SDK at http://www.odata.org and download “Dallas” CTP2 at http://www.Microsoft.com/Dallas.

The latest news from MIX10 is available at http://live.visitmix.com/press.