At the recently held MIX10 event, Microsoft proudly launched the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 accompanied with a presentation on the future roadmap and progress made till now in its development. The word catch-up seemed to be written large on the faces of presenters who valiantly put a case for why Internet Explorer 9 would be a good tool to browse future of web with HTML5, CSS3, SVG and AJAX and JavaScript thrown in. Perhaps the highlight for the presenters was when they were able to show how IE9 supports one feature that other browsers could not which was support for latest ICC colour profiles. Needless to mention that presenters did not elaborate on how the platform preview lacked video support or that ALL of the demos present on Platform Preview could be viewed easily in current Firefox version without any hitch (except for one minor feature, tell me if you find it; hint: it is in HTML 5).
To the credit of presenters, one thing that they impressed upon was the graphics intensive nature of HTML5 and why it is a good idea to have a browser than can delegate its rendering to GPU while processor can handle other tasks such as document layout and JavaScript.
While certainly a news worthy event, it would be interesting to see how IE9 matures in coming weeks and if it can introduce any game changer in the browser warfare instead of just catching up to other players. All signs till now indicate – maybe not.
