The Home Page
Here's what you see when you first run the Preview: Note that there are none of the typical browser tools like a Back button or even an address bar or search field.
Open a Web Page
You have to choose Open from the Page menu to load a Web page or local file using this simple entry box.
The Taskbar Icon
The Preview's task bar icon is distinguished from released versions of IE's by the mouse pointer in angle brackets.
PCMag.com
Here's how PCMagt.com shows up in the new browser engine. It loads quite snappily and is rendered nearly perfectly.
No Windows XP Allowed! ◄ (Irthepasty you will like this)
If you try to install the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview in Windows XP, you'll see a message like this.
Spinning Icons
Microsoft engineers have come up with this striking, animated 3D test to show off the browser engine's hardware acceleration.
Spinning Icons in Opera
In Opera, notice that the frame rate drops to 12 per second in the same Spinning Icons test. IE9 never drops below 60 fps.
SVG Butterfly
IE9 won't run all SVG graphics, but I found this butterfly that displayed perfectly.
SVG Butterfly Zoomed In
Zooming in on the butterfly shows no degredation in sharpness of the image's edges.
CSS Tests
The browser passes all of the CSS3.info site's Selectors Tests.
Acid3 Results ◄ (Irthepasty you're NOT gonna like this)
The new browser platform ups its Acid3 browser standards score to 55 from 20 in Internet Explorer 8.
IE5 Mode
Internet Explorer 9 uses modes of previous IE versions, including 5, 7, and 8, which you can force with hotkeys. I found that the IE7 mode didn't work EXACTLY like IE7, though. And this shot also shows a non-working SVG example.
No HTML5 Video Yet
Sadly, HTML5 video is not yet implemented in the Platform Preview.
Pulsating Bubbles
This XHTML page shows SVG basic shapes being animated using JavaScript.
No Canvas Support Yet
There should be a clock hand here that you can start and stop, but IE9 doesn't yet implement HTML5 Canvas, so the box is empty.
Diagnostic Tool
The Preview comes with tools for developers to test their sites.
HTML5 T-Shirt Designer
A very interactive demo that shows the use of XHTML namespaces styled with CSS, DOM Style and the CSS3 border-radius and opacity properties to create the color-picking widget, DOM Events (e.g., addEventListener) to be notified of mouse events that enable drawing on an SVG surface.
Print Preview
There's no actual Print feature in the Preview, but there's a Print Preview.
