Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) Updates IE 9 Preview with Improved HTML 5 Support

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) has updated the preview version of Internet Explorer 9 on Thursday adding support for several HTML 5 standards and added that the browser is now faster than ever before.

The preview version of the browser, last updated seven weeks ago, is not a full-fledged browser, but only a minimal interface wrapped around Microsoft’s newest rendering and JavaScript engines. The company debuted the IE9 preview in Mid-March at the Microsoft Mix conference and said that it would update the preview every 8 weeks or so until the company issues a public beta.

The third preview released on Wednesday adds support for the HTML 5 canvas element, the tag which lets users insert dynamic and scriptable 2D shapes and bitmap images into pages. The company also added hardware acceleration support for video and audio tags.

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) is relying heavily on boosting the performance of IE9 by offloading the browser’s text, image and video rendering to a computer’s graphics processing unit. “This is the first browser that uses hardware acceleration for everything on the Web page, on by default,” said Dean Hachamovich, the browser’s general manager, in an entry on the official Internet Explorer blog.

The company also said that the preview has improved in its JavaScript speed and web standards test scores. Microsoft says that IE9 Preview 3 completes the SunSpider JavaScript test suite almost 47% faster than its May predecessor, although it’s still not as Safari 5 or Google Chrome 5, but was more than 10 times faster at rendering JavaScript than 2009’s IE8, Microsoft said.

Microsoft also saw a 22% improvement in the Acid3 benchmark, a test which checks how closely a browser follows web standards. The IE9 Platform Preview 3 scored 83 out of a possible 100, a 22% improvement over Platform Preview 2.