Microsoft claim IE9 isn’t ‘handicapped’ like other browsers

Microsoft have made IE9 available for download yesterday, saying that IE9 relies on Windows more than any other browser on the market.

Microsoft said that other browsers such as Opera, Safari, Firefox and Chrome are ‘handicapped', because they work on different operating systems.

Internet Explorer 9 will use the power of a PC's hardware, just like regular applications. “The way sites are going to do that is through the browser. The way the browser does that is though the operating system, Other browsers dilute their engineering investments across a lot of different systems. Because IE focuses exclusively on one, IE can make the most of the Windows experience and PC hardware – just like graphics programs and games have done for years.”

Funnily enough, IE9 won't run on Windows XP, which is still on a huge percentage of computers. IE9 will only run on Windows Vista and Windows 7, computers that the Microsoft IE9 team call ‘modern PC's'.

IE9 has been fine tuned to take advantage of Direct X 3D graphics multimedia and gaming API's that interface with the graphics card. Firefox does use Direct 2D and Direct 3D for content acceleration on Windows Vista and 7 computers, but they are focused on WebGL for 2D and 3D graphics. WebGL is currently in the V 1.0 state and is supported by Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta and a preview version of Opera.

IE corporate vice president Dean Hachamovitch said “Some browsers offer a numbing sequences of nightly drops – and they may or may not work and they may or may not be reflect in what the final product will do.”

KitGuru says: Is IE9 the best Windows browser on the planet?

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