Microsoft announced its latest Internet Explorer Web browser will support HTML5, allowing web application developers who rely on IE to make even more dynamic Web sites with multimedia rich capabilities.
The company also released its "platform preview" Internet Explorer 9, but it's not an alpha or beta release yet. The preview is designed to give Internet users a look into the new type of features that will be available by incorporating HTML5 -- and it doesn't actually run like a Web browser.
Microsoft's IE9 platform preview includes better CSS 3 support along with a newer JavaScript Engine. The HTML5 rendering is GPU-accelerated -- making graphics and text rendering on Web sites faster.
Microsoft has received harsh criticism from PC users, with Mozilla Firefox continuing to eat away at IE's marketshare. Opera and Google Chrome also are options for Web users, but neither browser has been overly successful against IE or Firefox, although Chrome is now gaining steam.
Many folks in the tech world will closely follow the consumer behavior to see if IE9 will truly help Microsoft from continuing to shed Internet Explorer users -- company CEO Steve Ballmer also recently noted that Microsoft will also rely more on cloud computing in the future.
Since I still don't think hardware acceleration will suddenly propel IE 9 into the hearts and minds of PC users, I don't think it's going to matter. Even if IE 9 is unable to compete with Firefox, it's good to see Microsoft putting some real effort back into Internet Explorer.
