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Huge news. My canvas crusade is done. IE9 is supporting canvas, and it is hardware accelerated, in the third preview release:

With the third platform preview, we introduce support for the HTML5 Canvas element. As you know our approach for standards support is informed both by developer feedback and real word usage patterns today, along with where we see the web heading. Many web developers have asked us to support this part of HTML5 and we definitely took this feedback into account as we prioritized our work.

Like all of the graphics in IE9, canvas is hardware accelerated through Windows and the GPU. Hardware accelerated canvas support in IE9 illustrates the power of native HTML5 in a browser. We’ve rebuilt the browser to use the power of your whole PC to browse the web. These extensive changes to IE9 mean websites can now take advantage of all the hardware innovation in the PC industry.

Preview 3 completes the media landscape for modern websites with hardware accelerated video, audio, and canvas. Developers now have a comprehensive platform to build hardware accelerated HTML5 applications. This is the first browser that uses hardware acceleration for everything on the web page, on by default, available today for developers to start using for their modern site development.

The third platform preview continues to support more of DOM and CSS3 standards that developers want. Examples here include DOM Traversal, full DOM L2 and L3 events, getComputedStyle from DOM Style, CSS3 Values and Units, and CSS3 multiple backgrounds.

Also included in the third platform preview is support for using the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) through CSS3 font face.

Oh, and Acid3 is coming along too….. as well as a lot of performance improvements.

Congrats to the IE team.

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At MIX, Microsoft showed that they are back in the browser game with a preview of IE9 “platform” (platform seems to mean ‘haven’t got it together as a real browser yet, but we wanted to get it to you guys ASAP’).

Today, they updated the preview as they said they would (claiming they will do new releases every 8 weeks or so).

Table stakes these days is performance. IE8 is so far behind, but the IE team is showing that with IE9 they will be strong contenders:

To go along with this, we haver the GPU story of hardware acceleration. Test drive some new demos such as this Flickr Explorer or the browser flip

There are other tools too:

The Developer Tools in IE9 Platform Preview 2 include new features. The Console window is now a full tab that includes diagnostic information from IE. Developers can use the “Change User Agent String” menu item to experiment with sending different that UA strings to sites with every request, selecting from preset strings or creating their own custom string. This complements another feature we’ve included – the new IE9 UA string. (Steve! Update BrowserScope! :)

This is good timing. Giorgio Sardo of Microsoft is on a browser panel that Ben and I are moderating at Web 2.0 Expo today. The panel has other heavy hitters: Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software), and Alex Russell (Google). We are going to have some fun :)

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Bass Schouten is a cool name, and the Mozillan has presented Direct2D hardware acceleration.

You have to grab Firefox nightly, do the about:config / gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled game, but then you get to see it in action.

IE9 showed off how they will support hardware rendering, and I am sure we will see more at MIX, but it is very cool to see this across the board.

CSS Transforms/Transitions/Animations are going to feel like butter in 2010!

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