Microsoft: Internet Explorer 9 to close performance gap

As Firefox continues to grab marketshare from Internet Explorer, Microsoft is hard at work on improving its browser. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft president of Windows and Windows Live, revealed Internet Explorer 9 has been in development for a few weeks.

Sinofsky explained they've nearly closed the JavaScript performance gap between IE9 and Firefox and Google Chrome, and that they're working on making the browser more compatible with web standards. The latest IE9 development build scores 32 out of 100 on the Acid3 test, that's still nothing to brag about considering that browsers like Chrome, Opera and Safari score the full 100, but it's better than the 24 points scored by IE8.

Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, acknowledged that Microsoft had catching up to do. "We know we have a lot of work to do in some areas of performance," Sinofsky said today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

"On SunSpider, we're on par with IE9," Sinofsky said, showing a chart that displayed scores from the popular JavaScript benchmarking suite. Although IE9's scores were still slightly higher -- and thus slower -- than the newest browsers from competitors, its numbers were significantly better than IE8, Microsoft's current production edition.

"We're getting very close to the other browsers," said Sinofsky.

Source: ComputerWorld