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Internet Explorer 9 RC – download, what’s new and get your sites ready

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Dean Hachamovich has just announced availability of Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate on the official IE team blog. As Dean blogs, we have received a lot of feedback from developer and end-users. We have listened and now with the RC, IE9 has made progress in the areas of performance, standards, user interface, safety and privacy.

Actions:

  1. Download Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate through www.BeautyOfTheWeb.com (available in 40 languages)
  2. Test your sites and web applications, make sure you review the Developer’s Guide to adapt to the new standards support
  3. Report issues by using Send Feedback option in Internet Explorer (Tools or Alt+X > Send Feedback)

Platform Previews and what’s new

Since the release of Internet Explorer 9 Beta in September, we have also seen the release of new iterations of the Platform Preview. With IE9 Release Candidate, new features and additions surfaced through the Platform Previews have been rolled up into Internet Explorer 9 RC. For a good overview of where we have come from since the first Platform Preview announcement at MIX10 last year I’ve summed up the different blog posts on the official IE team blog.

Let’s now review some of the features for developers that Release Candidate brings us.

W3C Geolocation standard

IE9 Release Candidate brings support for Geolocation standard (documentation link).

HTML5 Semantic elements

Support for HTML5 semantic elements is enhanced. IE9 now supports the following elements: section, nav, article, aside, hgroup, header, footer, figure, figcaption and mark.

HTML5 Video

<video> and <audio> support was already announced (and discussed, see Another Follow-up on HTML5 Video in IE9) . The update you can fin in this RC is video accessibility for media controls and VP8 (WebM) alternative, if the user has the codec installed.

CSS3 2D Transforms

CSS3 2D Transforms properties are implemented through vendor prefixes:

Developer Tools

Worth mentioning that for Internet Explorer 9 the Developer Tools (F12) are getting an update with a means to switch UA, new Console tab, Network tab and performance measurement.
This article on SitePoint is worth a read: Debug Faster with F12 Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 9.

IE Pinned Sites enhancements

Developers can now implement in-page drag-to-pin support. This allows developers to set images as the source for end-user site pinning. The image can be an animation or explanation of how and why to drag the site to the taskbar.
Activating site pinning on an image is really easy and achieved by setting the “msPinSite” class.

<img src="images/dragtopinimage.png" class="msPinSite">

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