About the Platform Preview
The information published in this post is now out-of-date.
—IEBlog Editor, 11 September 2012
Today we’re excited to release the first ever Internet Explorer Platform Preview. The Platform Preview provides developers an early look at some of the features coming to Internet Explorer, enabling them to try out the new capabilities of the platform.
Why
When we released IE8, we said that our next steps started with listening to your feedback. A major part of what we heard, including comments to that same post, was that developers wanted more builds, more often. At the same time, given the high expectations of our users and the breadth of impact of changes we make to our platform, we need to carefully balance the quality of what we release with the frequency of releases. With the Platform Preview we want to strike a balance that provides developers an early and reliable hands-on experience with key parts of IE. With this Platform Preview, developers and people interested in standards and web development can try out new platform functionality and provide early feedback.
What It Is
The Internet Explorer Platform Preview is a light-weight frame around the core IE platform which includes the rendering and layout, object model, parsing, and script engines. It’s a way to try out the platform, and the experience improvements we’re making to performance, standards support and interoperability, enabling “the same markup” to work.
We designed the Platform Preview to be installed, side by side with IE8. The Platform Preview is not a replacement for your daily browser; for example, the Preview does not have an address bar, a back button, anti-phishing or malware protection. The Platform Preview does include debugging and diagnostics tools for developers. It also includes a way to provide feedback. The top level menus include Report Issue. You can find more information on how to use the Platform Preview in the User Guide.
This is the first Platform Preview. We will update it approximately every 8 weeks on the road to Beta. Each update will provide a more complete look at the IE9 platform. The Platform Preview along with these updates and the reporting tools are designed to speed up the feedback loop between developers and the IE platform.
What Developers Can Do
We ask that developers download and test drive the IE9 Platform Preview. We welcome feedback on how the Platform Preview works with your HTML, CSS, script, and other markup. We’ve provided a User Guide to help you make the most of the Platform Preview, as well as a Developer Guide with information about developing for the IE9 platform. The Preview’s start page is a Test Drive site with a set of samples that demonstrate some of what’s new in the platform. We want you to try the samples, look at the changes to the platform, and experience the new capabilities for yourself.
Some developers may already have sites that use the new capabilities. Other developers may write sample code to test out the functionality. In either case, we’d like to hear about your experience with the new features. Where possible, we’ve documented any known issues along with available workarounds in the Release Notes. In another blog post coming later today, we’ll talk about how you can best provide feedback.
We’re excited to be able to engage with our community in this way with the IE9 Platform Preview. We’re looking forward to seeing what developers build on top of the new platform, and to hear back from you about your experiences. Please check back on this blog and on the Test Drive site for information and updates in the coming weeks and months.
Justin Saint Clair
Program Manager
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The comment has been removedAnonymous
March 16, 2010
Wow! Thank you IE team. This is fantastic and you should all get raises! REALLY like what I see here. Don't forget to add in a spell checker to IE9 please. Can't wait to see the final product.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
It doesn't install on Server 2008. It would be nice if it did. Sounds promising. Will tabs not take a long time to open a new one with IE9?Anonymous
March 16, 2010
Thanx guys, but no XP support for linked installer means some of us still need to wait, before seeing it in action.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
Jason: tabs open instantly in IE8 already. If that's not the case for you, disable the Java SSV helper browser plugin, it causes 99.9% of the slow tab problems.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
I was a bit confused at first however being able to open up pages via the file menu I was able to manually verify it was indeed a build of IE9. I'm happy to see border-radius, opacity, and RGBA though I really hope to see a few more CSS3 related things primarily multi-column layout support (try reading the my or the IE blog at 1920x1200). The GPU acceleration is AWESOME! I'm very impressed with the performance overall and hopefully you guys can get my benchmark to work successfully. In regards to XHTML I tested some broken XHTML pages and IE9 still rendered the pages regardless of the XML errors; I presume this is a known issue that you folks are working on? It'll be really nice to have both XHTML1 and XHTML5 supported in addition to HTML5 in IE9. I'm looking forward to future builds. Also in regards to the GUI remember that the file menu stays on TOP, nothing belongs on the tab bar except for tabs; and please let us actually customize the GUI this time. My computer should be MY computer, not something set in stone. cough Mac coughAnonymous
March 16, 2010
For the sake of convenience, it would be great if you could add a URL toolbar to it. But other that, it's really great!Anonymous
March 16, 2010
please please please XP support!!! i want to use it there till i get a new PC... so many cool stuff and then you tell me i can't run it? it's not fair...Anonymous
March 16, 2010
SVG! CSS3! HTML5! Is this really Internet Explorer? Wow. Thanks guys.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
How can I be part of the technical beta? I have tons of feedback on existing bugs. Also, you are kidding right? There's no way you are not supporting XP with this.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
I'm really glad you've decided to implement SVG in IE9. I already have a site that I want to test in IE9 which uses SVG and HTML (which I think is what you want me to do); the only problem is the DOMContentLoaded and dataavailable events aren't working so I can't test, will events like this be "hooked up" in the next preview?Anonymous
March 16, 2010
Thanks a lot for this, it is good to see you catching up quickly with the state of the art. I wish you luck and success. Will you support WebGL? It would be good for cross-platform developers like me if you'd follow Apple's, Google's, Opera's and Mozilla's lead and released IE9 for the broadest possible set of operating systems. Windows XP, of course, but also Mac OSX and maybe even Linux (or at least make it work in the Wine emulator) so that we can test that our web pages work well on your browser like we can do for the rest. Thank you for every step you make toward interoperability, compatibility, and the adoption of established W3C standards. By doing so you guys are making everybody's life better. Kudos to you!Anonymous
March 16, 2010
I want to check the platform preview. but I can't install this in my computer :S I'm using Windows XP SP3 any solution ?Anonymous
March 16, 2010
The effort is appreciated and it is good to see that MS is working on improving IE, but implementing SVG support in detriment of a canvas implementation is very disappointing.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
« Thanks for checking out this site. The purpose of these demos is to convey a concept and not intended to be used as a best practice for web development. Enjoy! » You mean it's not best practise to include code that checks for Netscape 6 in the user agent? ;-)Anonymous
March 16, 2010
Please support XP as Windows Vista+Windows 7 combined make only 24% of total Windows customer base. Does Microsoft want to alienate its users? XP can get IE9 without the HW acceleration but with other rendering improvements.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
As a web developer I'm very excited to hear about the huge improvements in JS speed and CSS3 and SVG support, but what video codec(s) will IE9 support? I'm currently using Ogg/Theora on my sites (with a Java applet as fallback, but that's sloooow) since everyone supports it (except Safari), and I would hate to have to encode every video with a different codec only for IE. So please, if you don't do it already, support decoding Theora video and Vorbis audio.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
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March 16, 2010
Dear IE team, XP was the latest OS till Jan 2007 and then your product called Vista was largely shunned and only managed to reach 15% marketshare. Windows 7 became available in October last year and considering the extremely vast marketshare of XP (you say you sold 90 million copies yet market share data from multiple data sources shows it at 9%.) So XP machines connecting to the internet (65%) are 650 million? Can't Microsoft simply support GDI rendering on XP but give them the rendering side improvements?Anonymous
March 16, 2010
Please DO NOT support XP IE9 will become rubbish by supporting XP.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
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March 16, 2010
@Arieta - IE8 tabs are very slow for most users. We have all disabled MS Research, the Java SSV helper thing, Spybot S&D restricted sites, and all other un-necesary IE addons however IE is still incredibly slow at opening new tabs due to the bad initialization architecture. This has been discussed over and over on this blog hundreds of times. 1,000s of users can confirm that IE8 is slow at opening new tabs as they see it every single day. What came out of every single discussion was the same conclusion - it doesn't matter what addons a user has installed - if IE can't handle them then that is IE's problem - don't blame the users addons. Finally, if MSFT is going to continue blaming addons for incredibly poor new tab load times they need to come forth and list the top 10 most offending plugins so that users actually have the ability to fix IE. I'm tired of hearing that it is the addons fault. If it really is, then step up and help users find them and disable them or at least identify them so that the developers can fix their code if they want to remain competitive and desired. Sick and Tired of MSFT blaming addons, MichaelAnonymous
March 16, 2010
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March 16, 2010
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March 16, 2010
The only new feature for the next Preview release should be support for XP. We can't be happy about IE9 (and it deserves, the list of changes is incredible) if the people can't use it, and people uses XP.Anonymous
March 16, 2010
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March 17, 2010
A few precisions:
- if you're using Windows 7, installing it is a breeze.
- if you're using Windows Vista, get ready to pull hair. First thing first: I installed in a virtual machine (VirtualBox 3.1), with a 32-bit Vista DVD I had around. You can try Starter, it's supposedly a bit lighter. First snag: Service Pack 2 is required. So, get ready to install SP1 then SP2, since they are not cumulative. Rather longuish - if you have a 7 DVD around, that alone would convince you to forgo Vista. Second snag: you need IE 8 installed. OK, not a big deal, it's listed as a security update anyway. Third snag: you need to update the Windows Graphics Foundation (or something like that), because of Direct2D. But this download requires WGA, thus Validating your Vista version, so if you expected to run your Preview on a trial version of Windows Vista, you're out of luck. These precisions would have been nice to have.
Anonymous
March 17, 2010
Please make it so that the user can customize the menu and tool bars any way we want. Adding a spell checker would be great! Being able to adjust the resolution independently from the general settings could be useful; I know I would use it. Always have the IE window open full screen, easer to reduce than resize it, close it and open it up again to the preferred size. I have several more ideas that I will post later. ThanksAnonymous
March 17, 2010
I LOVE the SVG support, it would be nice to have some links to catch up on SVG2. It's an ideal format for converting technical drawings from a native file format to render them to the web page in vector format. Not all web content is advertising ;-)Anonymous
March 17, 2010
Just wanted to say that this thing BLAZES! I'm very happy with it so far, and I also think that keeping this as a Vista/Windows 7 exclusive is a good idea. I really wish there was a registry mod or something to change the homepage, though. Besides the lack of a back button, this thing might as well be my new browser of choice.Anonymous
March 17, 2010
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March 18, 2010
Oh, that sounds great. Can't wait to see the final product. :-) http://winwear.blogspot.com/2010/03/internet-explorer-9-testdrive.htmlAnonymous
March 18, 2010
Good to hear that Microsoft is investing heavily in IE9 and open to feedback. Please include color management support so that serious photographers don't have to use Firefox!Anonymous
March 19, 2010
@Harald Mühlhoff IE9 does indeed support color management - go to http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter with the dev preview.Anonymous
March 19, 2010
HI Guys, Great start, would be great if you could add a URL toolbar to it. Interesting to see the reaction and modelling with phpbb. Hardware acceleration is great and very smooth. Hopefully the final build will have the same speed. watching with interestAnonymous
March 20, 2010
Good work, but for the next preview, and Address Bar would be really nice. After a bit of testing, Opera is still owning you guys in terms of pretty much everything, but the progess from IE8 is HUGE. BTW, it freezes at 6% of Google's sputnik javascript test on my computer (which has very good hardware).Anonymous
March 23, 2010
Great work guys! It seems pretty awesome so far. How about support for canvas and Ogg Theora though? Oh and please guys release this to the public before 2011!