Internet Explorer 9 Makes Its Debut – Has HTML5 Support and GPU Acceleration

Over at Gizmodo John Herrman is singing the praises of Internet Explorer 9, just announced today. The next version of Microsoft’s venerable browser is full of sound and fury, but is it worth getting excited over? There’s a key bit in Herrman’s analysis that pinpoints the answer:

“…while IE9 might not outpace the fastest browsers out there, it’s at least close. And hilariously faster than IE8. Again, they’re at least trying, and when you’ve got the market share (and history of ignoring standards) that Microsoft does, this is, again, worth a lot.”

It sure is. Almost since the beginning Internet Explorer was the bane of web designers and developers everywhere. Sites that were designed perfectly to fit HTML standards with CSS so clean and beautiful is should be published would look like Picasso had gotten hold of them on IE even while they looked fine everywhere else. Now Microsoft is embracing standards, saying that IE9 will support core HTML 5 features like h.264 video, embedded audio, scalable vector graphics, and CSS3. Just like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera… All of that is very exciting for web designers/developers and the people they work for, but what about those of you who just want to visit websites? It should mean a faster browsing experience, better video rendering, and fewer sites that tell you to switch to a better browser if you want to view them properly.Plus, IE9 supports hardware accelerated graphics and text — the first browser to do so, according to Nvidia. Will there come a day when IE is no longer the browser you use just because it’s what came pre-installed and is, instead, the browser you love to use because it’s awesome? With no official launch date I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, you can try out IE9 for yourself. It’s a preview build, though, so you’re not likely to have much fun unless you’re really, really into browsers.