New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power

Microsoft pushed out another preview release of Internet Explorer 9. This is not a new beta — we’re still months away from the official arrival of Internet Explorer 9 — but we’re definitely approaching the finish line.

Wednesday’s release, dubbed Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 (whew) includes a big performance boost with a newly revamped JavaScript engine inside of it.

The last preview release of IE9, which only arrived a few weeks ago, saw increased support for web standards. But Microsoft made it clear to us during a phone briefing that Wednesday’s release is all about speed and performance.

To that point, PP7 contains an updated version of the Chakra JavaScript engine. This new engine for IE9 was first introduced at Microsoft’s PDC developer event in November 2009. During the last year, the company has been improving Chakra to the point where it’s now scoring more than 300 percent higher on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark than it was at launch.

Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin from the IE team says the new release scores 234.6 ms on SunSpider’s JavaScript execution performance test. Read more about the testing stuff on the IE Blog.

While some browsers are certainly faster than others, the major browser vendors continue to tweak their internal workings and make speed improvements. JavaScript performance is particularly important, since modern web applications like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on scripted actions. A faster browser means a snappier web app. Just last week, Mozilla released a new beta of Firefox 4 that included revamped code for its JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey JavaScript engines.

You can download this early version of the next IE browser directly from Microsoft. It’s available for PCs running Windows 7 and Vista. Also, this platform preview can be installed alongside IE9 Beta or IE8 with no problems.

Facebook Profiles Get a Facelift

A large percentage of net users’ online identities will be getting a facelift in the coming weeks as Facebook is rolling out a new profile page with more visual elements and, you guessed it, more pictures of faces.
The new design is currently opt-in, but Facebook says it will roll it out to the world by early 2011. Those who want it immediately can go to the new profile explainer, which will walk you through the new pages and let you adopt it now. But be cautioned, there’s no undoing the choice.
The top of the page will now include a basic intro to a user, such as location, job, school, partner, etc. And directly underneath that is a bar of photos that you have been “tagged” in, increasing the number of pictures of the person’s face you see on the page. In fact, the photo algorithm doesn’t just show the photos you are tagged in, but zooms in on your face to make it fill the small square.
Here’s hoping you are ready for your close-up. You can choose to remove photos by clicking on them, and the option remains to “untag” yourself from any photo, no matter who took it.
Nearly everything on the page gets the same, more visual treatment.