My TOP 5 features in IE9 RC

  • Article

Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate is now available for download here.

There are many news, from new HTML5 features to enhanced performance, from state-of-the-art security to redesigned user experience. Here’s my TOP 5:

1 – W3C Geo-location Standard

A page is now able to request the user location in a secure way using a few lines of code. The geo-location specification is now implemented by all major browsers! There’s no more reason for Google Maps to use browser detection code and block that feature to IE users…

 if (navigator.geolocation != undefined)
     navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(onPositionFound, onPositionError);
  
 function onPositionFound(pos) {
     Debug("Lat: " + pos.coords.latitude + ", Long: " + pos.coords.longitude);
 }

2 – Clean User Experience

IE9 has by far the cleanest UI of all browsers out there today. Huge step forward from IE8!

image

(left to right: IE8, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE9)

3 – Performance

It’s fast. It’s smoking fast! You can measure it with synthetic benchmarks, you can run the demos on ietestdrive…but my advice is to run it with your favorite site. There’s no better benchmark than that!

image

(running The City of Videos demo on IE9 RC and Firefox 4.0beta11. Press ‘f’ to see FPS)

4 – F12 Developer Tools JavaScript Formatting

I absolute love the ability to format the JavaScript code using the F12 Developer Tools (embedded in the browser, you don’t need to install addons).

imageFormat

5 – Canvas globalCompositeOperation

As noted earlier, we have not been able to implement the remaining part of the <canvas> specification (globalCompositeOperation) in IE9 Beta due to still happening important conversation in W3C at that time. Since then we made a good progress and we are now happy to announce full support for the <canvas> spec in IE9 RC!

image

(Scratch-off demo by Beej Jorgensen)

Obviously there is much more…What are your TOP 5 features?