At its Mix Conference at Las Vegas, Microsoft gave a preview of what is to come with its next web-browser Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, which is a prototype to show how IE9 will handle the current web technologies and the new ones to come.

Internet Explorer 9 is stated to offer better performance with graphics, text, and JavaScript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware. It will also have support for new web standards like HTML5 and CSS3. Another interesting development is that IE9 will now support SVG, which it has shunned for years. These moves means Microsoft is serious about going with the web standards rather than trying to set its own standards, like it has been doing in earlier versions of IE.

Internet Explorer 9 is also getting a new JavaScript engine, codenamed "Chakra". A big difference between Chakra and other JavaScript engines used in rival browsers is that Chakra supports multi-core. This means that with multi-core systems, multiple cores are actually utilized to provide faster performance. IE9 will also support Microsoft's Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies. This will give a performance boost in handling SVG files.

If you want to try it out, you can download the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview.