Microsoft has released its IE 9 preview #2 and is touting the many improvements made over the previous releases. Available for download now on ietestdrive.com, the latest version has several enhancements over the previous betas.
On the official IEblog, Microsoft states that “today’s release builds on the first Platform Preview, delivering improvements to IE9’s performance, support for standards, and hardware acceleration of HTML5…As part of our commitment to enabling developers to use the Same Markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – on the web, we have contributed many new tests to the W3C for HTML5, as well as CSS3 Media Queries and DOM. The Developer Tools in this preview include some new features to make finding and fixing markup issues easier.”
Microsoft also showed off some of the browsers capabilities by running the Acid 3 test and the Webkit Sunspider test (JavaScript) results.
The Acid 3 tests shows a score of 68/100, while better than previous version, it shows that Microsoft still has room for improvement. They state “as IE runs more of the “same markup” that developers actually use on the web, our Acid3 score will continue to go up.”
On the JavaScript results, the IE9 browser has shown great improvement over IE8 but it is still trailing Chrome, Opera and Safari. “we continue to make IE9’s script engine faster for real world sites, IE will continue to become faster at this particular benchmark as well. To date we’ve done very little specific tuning for Webkit Sunspider. As with most benchmarks, depending on your machine, the differences may vary.”
The bigger question is will Microsoft’s latest browser help to stem the loss of market share. With IE for the first time dropping below 60% market share, there will be a lot of attention given to IE 9 to see if it can match or even beat its competitors.
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Google Chrome 3.0.192.x has been released to the Dev channel for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Highlights in this release:
- (Mac) Enabled support for the Mac OS X spellchecking service.
- (Mac) First cut at popup blocking for Mac.
- (Linux) Accelerator keys like ctl-C for copy should work again.
- (Linux) Initial support of complex text (e.g. Arabic). Bug reports welcome.
- (Linux) Initial GTK theme support.
- (Linux) IME support.
- (Extensions) Breaking API Change: page_actions.icon renamed to
- page_action.icons and changed from a single string to an array of
- strings.
- (All) Added support for exporting/ importing bookmarklet bookmarks, thanks to Thiago.
- (All) Fixed Acid3 Test 48: LINKTEST
Known issues:
- Issue 15199: New windows open off screen, in certain conditions, for dual montior users.
- Issue 16052: Tab closes if a new url is navigated to quickly during a page load.
More details are available in the release notes and the log of all revisions.
You can find out about getting on the Dev channel here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.
If you find new issues, please let us know by filing a bug at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry.
Anthony Laforge
Google Chrome Program Manager
Download: Google Chrome 3.0.192.1
The results are in from benchmarks of Firefox 3.5, performed by ZDNet.
The benchmarks test all the main browsers from Google Chrome 2.0.172.33, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3.0.5, Opera 10 Alpha and Internet Explorer 8. Each browser was put through three tests including SunSpider javascript benchmark, V8 Benchmark Suite and finally the ACID 3 test.
Firefox 3.5 was built for speed and performance, compared to previous versions of Firefox. Firefox 3.5 performed better than Firefox 3.0.5 and Internet Explorer 8 in all three categories.
From the graphs, it is clear to see that Google Chrome performed the best overall, followed shortly by Safari 4 and then Firefox 3.5. Firefox 3.5 scored a 93 on the ACID 3 test, falling shortly behind Google Chrome, Safari and Opera 10 alpha, all scoring a perfect 100.
Firefox 3.5 is fast and speedy, but it’s still lacking the speed of Google Chrome or Safari 4 in terms of performance benchmarks.
