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At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support.
The most interesting improvements is that Internet Explorer 9 will move graphics and text rendering to the graphics chip, using DirectX's Direct2D. Sinofsky showed several demonstrations, one of which showed the difference between non-GPU and GPU rendering: Bing Maps did about 14fps without using the GPU, and up to 60fps while using the GPU.
Internet Explorer 9 will also come with a new JavaScript engine, as well as better standards support - including HTML5 and CSS3. This means that this new version of Internet Explorer finally gets the features other browser have had for a while.
Obviously, Internet Explorer 8 was released in March, so it might take a while for IE9 to be ready
What's to come in IE9?
While Microsoft is just getting started gathering input, three veteran Microsoft analysts already have opinions on what they'd like to see in the next major IE update.
Matt Rosoff, a research vice president at Directions on Microsoft, would like to see tangible changes such as faster installation, a simple way to enable and disable browser plug-ins, an integrated Twitter client, smoother importing and organizing of favorites, and a link to Microsoft's cloud storage service, Live SkyDrive.
You could argue that browsers are over-featured.
"What about a 'Save This Page to SkyDrive' menu item?" Rosoff said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. "This could be useful for archiving permanent copies of pages that change or disappear frequently." SkyDrive holds up to 25GB worth of content.
Meanwhile, Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, has his own priorities.
"I personally would like to see better-engineered keyboard shortcuts that allow you to do common tasks with fewer keystrokes and not have to touch the mouse as often," Kay told InternetNews.com in an e-mail.
Overall, however, he has one big gripe.
"Browsers in general have become humongous pieces of software -- in fact, you could argue that browsers are over-featured," Kay said.
Competitive factors come into play as well, of course.
"Make it a better application front-end," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com. "Chrome is designed to host applications, [and] IE should have an application mode that optimizes the browser for this function."
In addition, Microsoft has to bring its Windows Mobile browser up to "parity" with IE, observers said.
"Currently the [Microsoft] mobile browser is the worst in segment while Safari and Chrome are at near-parity on the desktop and phone," Enderle said. "The market growth is on things like smartphones, and Microsoft needs to be competitive here fast."
TAGS: Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Firefox, Internet Explorer