“Today’s release builds on the first Platform Preview, delivering improvements to IE9’s performance, support for standards, and hardware acceleration of HTML5.  We’ve also updated the test drive site with a new set of developer samples to show what developers can do with GPU-powered HTML5. As part of our commitment to enabling developers to use the Same Markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – on the web, we have contributed many new tests to the W3C for HTML5, as well as CSS3 Media Queries and DOM. The Developer Tools in this preview include some new features to make finding and fixing markup issues easier” wrote Internet Explorer’s General Manager Dean Hachamovitch.

Microsoft testing shows the browser is also slightly faster in SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test then the previous preview release, with the browser still being faster than Firefox 3.6 and Firefox.Next builds.

The release come days after figures show that Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped below the 60% mark for the first time since late 1998.

Windows users wanting to test Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview #2 can download the browser from ietestdrive.com.

The results are pleasing, with the browser clearly heading in the correct direction. Graphed results are below.

The results for the Acid3 test were to be expected, with both Opera 10 Alpha and Beta 1 scoring 100%, better than Opera 9.64′s 85%. In comparison Internet Explorer 8 only scores 17% in the Acid3 test.

The V8 Benchmarks also look good, with Opera 10 clearly ahead of Opera 9.64. Noticeable, there is not much improvement between the Alpha and Beta 1. This test has a base score of 100, and everything over that is better. Opera 9.64 scored 164, while Opera 10 Alpha scored 192 and Opera 10 Beta 1 scored 193.

The SunSpider benchmak results are also looking good. This time there is a noticable improvement between Opera 10 Alpha and Opera 10 Beta 1, with these browsers scoring 4760ms and 4616ms respectively. Opera 9.64 scored a respectable 5523ms.

Overall it looks like Opera 10 is going to be a great release from Opera, with a hugely improved rendering engine, along with a much much faster JavaScript engine. Congratulations to the Opera Desktop team and I egarly await the final release of the browser.

Opera fans can download Opera 10 Beta 1 from the Opera Beta website.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols put both of these browser through the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test. Not surprising the results were very stunning with Firefox 3.1 beta taking it out.

Of interesting note is that Firefox 3.1 beta is almost 25 times faster when rendering JavaScript compared to Internet Explorer 7.

You can read the article in full and get all the details.

• Chrome 0.2
• Safari 4
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.5.2
• Firefox 3.1
• Firefox 3.0.1
• IE7
• IE8 Beta 2

Testing, using three benchmarking tools; SunSpider, V8 Benchmark, and Dromaeo, has produced some interesting results. Results show that Google Chrome is ahead in all but one benchmark test – very impressive for a browser that is still in its early beta stages. It shows the performance of the new V8 JavaScript engine and the power of the WebKit rendering engine found in both Chrome and Safari.

You can read the full JavaScript Performance Rundown article to see the other (not-so)surprissing results.