Microsoft has released an early preview of their upcoming IE9. Be sure to check out the new features at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive
One of the great news is the native support for the vector graphics language SVG.
SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation already back in 2003, so it’s about time we developers can start use this great technology.
Speedy performance
IE9 uses the GPU for graphic rendering through DirectX, and this gives good performance, currently beyond what all other browsers can perform.
Currently scores 28% in test
In this earliy build, only some SVG functions are implemented. This results in poor rendering of more advanced SVG files. See the SVG test chart where IE9 Preview 1 gets a score on 28% at http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php
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Last week Youtube announced they are adding support for viewing 1080p HD videos. (tips: add &fmt=37 to end of the links)
Typekit is commercial service that lets you embed non-standard fonts into HTML pages. It is relatively easy to use and takes care of all the licensing issues. So far, all good. Yesterday, I did a quick test of the service using the font LFT Etica Display.
I must say results were disappointing and showed far too much difference than what’s acceptable. It may have something to do with this specific font, like the font-hinting.
It’s sad to see that Opera is not supported at all, even though the latest versions have native support for font embedding.
All the tests were done on a Windows 7 PC.