Microsoft touts IE9's speed. Smoke screen, I say.

Microsoft announced that in a release of IE9 beta, it will have graphics hardware acceleration that beats Chrome and Firefox.  But it's like a half-truth, because at the point that Microsoft releases IE9 beta and finalized versions out to the public, we could be seeing Chrome 7 move out into the beta channel with support for graphics hardware acceleration.  And we already know that Chrome plans to release updates much faster than before.

But more than that, IE8 is severely lacking in support of web standards either using the ACID3 test or the HTML5Test, AND IE9 won't support XP.  So what this means, is that IE8's lack of support for HTML5 will cripple people who use XP while the internet moves to HTML5 over the next year.  And hey, just a reminder but IE8 also fails the javascript test (ECMA-262)

Of course, for those waiting to use IE9, PP4 still remains far behind Chrome 7, (and 6 dev channel) in the HTML5Test, and it's not clear that IE9 will beat Chrome, even when it moves into beta.

But we won't really know until Wednesday (Sept 15) when Microsoft is expected to release IE9 beta.  At that point, we'll be able to test it closely.  But don't expect it to support WebM open video codec standards.  In fact, Microsoft can't really help but be Microsoft, so you shouldn't be expecting it to support 100% standards; that is to say, we've heard that announcement before.

(And by the way, my harping on Microsoft doesn't mean that I strongly dislike them.  To the contrary, they have some great products in visual programming, security software, silverlight and photosynth.)