A lot has been talked about recently regarding Internet Explorer 9. At the PDC, Steven Sinofski talked about IE9’s new development lines and there are some interesting features and improvements being taken care of. For starters, the standards! IE9 will support CSS 3.0 and HTML 5, which was already expected.

Performance-wise, Microsoft is making a huge investment. Performance disadvantages of IE8 are widely known and the team wants to change this in the 9th iteration of Internet Explorer.

Javascript rendering engine and DOM processing are getting huge improvements. Steven admitted that script performance in IE was the worst, and this was shown in a chart ported in the IEBlog, on the left.

Also, DirectX will be put into the equation. PC hardware will be taken into account on web page text and image rendering and animations.