I am currently at MIX 10 in Las Vegas together with Mads Kristensen and Kenneth Auchenberg.
The IE9 keynote was great and revealed many new facets of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9. There will be a new Jscript engine, codenamed “Chakra”, lots of HTML 5 support and hardware acceleration of almost all rendering aspects – not just for text and images, but also for SVG and video playback.
Chrome and Firefox were literally stutteriing when they tried to play a single 720P video while IE9 was running smoothly with two simultaneous 720P streams, and the performance of the new Trident engine was even better when it came to animating SVG and CSS.
“Chakra” is still in development and can be experienced in the IE9 developer preview at ietestdrive.com. The current JScript engine in IE8 is JScript 5.8 where as the new “Chakra” engine identifies itself as JScript 9.0. “Chakra” will compile Javascript in the background across multiple CPU cores, so I expect to see some reentrant vulnerabilities.
I will dig deeper into IE9 when I get the chance, to see what kind of security vulnerabilities I can uncover.
Another point of interest at the conference is the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series; the name is too long, they should really just remove the “Series” suffix.
I had a chance to play with the phone, but the Microsoft guys were not really that keen on revealing what browser version it is running. Despite this, I managed to secure a copy of the useragent string:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0) Asus;Galaxy6
Unlike the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 will launch with a browser that does not support the latest web standards.Far from it, actually, as IE7 is already starting to feel outdated. There is some consolation, in that the mobile version of IE7 will incorporate some of the new technologies from IE8.
Anyway, back to the conference..
Update: I am covering the latest buzz surrounding IE9 at IE9Buzz.com 
I was thinking Long Time No See and then I saw your last post. How funny! Welcome back.
I liked the way you write all your blogs. Keep it up.
I don’t know Thor; I just think that Microsoft’s reputation with new products is just too overwhelming to be a part of the first group of people looking for development and improvement. I think I much rather be a part of the group that will actually get the fully functioning product in a year or two when all the bugs are worked out. That has been windows MO for a long time, and I haven’t seen enough to change my point of view.
Do you know IE9 is faster and more security than IE8??
I’m disappointed with IE8, it take time to add new tab
It would be great! HTML5! I was talking to an Microsoft MVP from south america and he told me a lot of great thing about IE9.
Pretty impressive playing 2 720P videos without any issues at all. I kinda feel like the others are getting ahead of firefox. Maybe it is just me but the browser gets kinda slow.
I havent used IE since the old days but this sounds like I should give the upcoming version a try.
They can keep making IE 10, 11, etc. Still can’t beat the safari.
Thanks for the info. Please keep us updated and let us know if you find any security vulnerabilities.
I impressed with your great post with nice contents…….
Internet explorer needs lots of improvements, firefox currently beats them….whenever I try watching free movies online, I have to stick with FF because IE takes too long to process them
Thanks you for your article.
Nice informations
Thor, will you be giving more details on what you discovered at the conference?
ie 8 ,9 ,10 ,11 … :S:S:S