A Preview of Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft (News - Alert)'s next version of Internet Explorer probably won't hit the market until next year. But the folks in Redmond have already provided a glimpse of what we can expect with IE9. Unlike your typical beta, the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview doesn't show you the actual browser's interface. But it does let you open Web pages and run certain demos to see how IE9 will handle a variety of tasks and challenges.

The Platform Preview is particularly designed to showcase how IE9 will play ball with HTML 5 and CSS (News - Alert) 3, the next major revisions of the two core platforms on which Web pages are built. As such, the Preview is of greatest interest to Web designers and developers who'll need to write content compatible with HTML 5 and CSS 3 as well as IE9. But I think IT admins who support Internet Explorer will also want to keep tabs on the progress of Microsoft's next browser edition.

After unveiling the initial release of the Platform Preview in March, Microsoft launched version 2 earlier this month and has promised to update the Preview every couple of months so we can track the growth of the new version.

If you want to see how IE9 tackles a small number of tasks, you can run the Test Drive Preview directly from the Web site.

At the Test Drive page you'll see a limited but interesting collection of demos to run. A set called Speed Demos taps into your computer hardware to run some processor-intensive tasks. One demo named Map Zooming measures how fast the browser can zoom in and out of a map. Another one named Flickr Explorer displays a huge thumbnail view of photos from the popular Flickr photo-sharing site and lets you search for specific photos based on keywords. The HTML5 Demos let you try out some of the new properties and styles available in HTML 5 and CSS 3, while the Graphics Demos show you how IE9 handles different graphic formats and color profiles.

You can run some benchmark and performance tests to see how IE9 fares on certain scales. For example, you can try the Acid 3 test, a well-known benchmark to gauge how compatible the browser is with HTML standards, and the CSS 3 Selectors test, which determines how compatible the browser is with a range of CSS elements, or selectors.

If you want to test the full range of current functions and open up Web pages within the IE9 Preview, you'll need to download and install the actual Preview application. To do that, click on the 'Install the Preview' link on the Test Drive page. Be aware that the Preview app only works on Windows Vista SP2 or later operating systems, such as Windows 7.

This application offers the full range of demos so you can take IE9 though its paces. Some of the demos are particularly valuable as they show how HTML 5 and CSS 3 should solve some of the current problems in Web design. For example, one of the demos illustrates how setting a minimum and maximum width in your CSS code enables your pages to adapt to a variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Beyond these demos, you can also open any Web page within the IE9 Preview app. Just select the Page menu, click on Open, and then type the full URL of any page you'd like to see. You can even see what the same pages look like in past versions of IE by forcing them to display in IE5, 7, or 8 mode.

Compatibility with the upcoming versions of HTML and CSS and an adherence to Web standards are critical factors for IE9. Microsoft has taken its share of lumps in the past, and deservedly so, for not always following HTML standards in Internet Explorer. One of the most frustrating challenges for Web designers and developers is browser compatibility. What looks good and works right in one browser may not in another. So, all of us who work on the Web are hoping the releases of HTML 5 and CSS 3 may prompt Microsoft and the other browser vendors to all start playing by the same rules.