Internet Explorer 9: A Fresh Start, With HTML5.

Ninth time's the charm, sometimes! At least that's Microsoft's hope with IE9, which they've just announced at Mix, brings new HTML5 support (including HTML5 video!), hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and a totally new JavaScript engine—and no XP support.

Microsoft's just demoed the latest build of IE9, the final version of which doesn't yet have a release date, and for something as sleepy as a browser, it's pretty cool. Here's what's new:
HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It's magic! It's going to save the internet! It's going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it's more subtle than that: It's the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they're talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn't require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they're drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer's various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They're finally trying, is the point.
Read the rest of the article and the rest of the new stuff in ie9 here> http://gizmodo.com/5494574/internet-...art-with-html5

I for 1 will be patiently awaiting a release of ie9, the overlords at Redmond are at least making an effort to do something right with ie.