Computerworld - Microsoft is back in the browser race, an analyst said today after the company unveiled a rough developer's preview of its next browser, IE9.
"They want to be more than a follower or just on features parity," said Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish as she talked about what she saw as a recommitment to Internet Explorer (IE). "And they've created a whole new team for IE. Microsoft is clearly taking the browser seriously again."
Among the newer faces on the IE team, said McLeish, is Ted Johnson, the co-founder of Visio Corp. and from January 2000 to March 2003, a corporate vice president at Microsoft. Johnson, who according to his LinkedIn account rejoined Microsoft in August 2008, now carries the title Partner PM Architect on IE, and is the senior architect responsible for the browser's graphics and rendering.
"Microsoft has lined up some very experienced engineers" for the IE team, McLeish said. "It's really a crack team."
The renewed emphasis shows that Microsoft is taking its browser, and the competition in the browser market, seriously. "You want that real estate," McLeish said, adding that IE is important to Microsoft, something others have questioned. "It's important from a pure visibility and branding angle. The browser is the way to promote search, for Microsoft that means Bing, and of course Microsoft has an interest in creating the best experience it can within Windows."
Microsoft may not believe that only its engineers can create the best Windows browser, but it certainly thinks they're up to the task. As proof, McLeish noted the hardware acceleration Microsoft's touting for IE9, which doesn't run on Windows XP.
Earlier today, Dean Hachamovich, the general manager for IE development, spelled out IE9's performance enhancements during a 40-minute presentation at MIX10, the Web developer conference Microsoft kicked off Monday. Among them: background JavaScript compiling on a separate processor core, graphics processor acceleration of text and graphic rendering, and an upcoming update to the IE9 preview for hardware acceleration of HTML 5 video.
"IE9 is exponentially faster at dynamic rendering than its predecessor," said McLeish. "It's very slick, very speedy."
Hachamovich repeated a claim made last fall by his boss, Stephen Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows, that IE9 had essentially closed the enormous JavaScript performance gap between itself and rivals made by Mozilla, Google and Apple. Today, Hachamovich showed a slide during his keynote that put IE9's platform preview as slightly faster than Firefox 3.6, slightly slower than Safari, Chrome and Opera 10.5 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks.
"We're faster than many other browsers," Hachamovich said, pointing to the slide. "And we've only done a little bit of optimization for SunSpider so far."
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