Two weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer debuted his company's new slogan for all things Web: "We're all in."
The phrase made another appearance Tuesday at Microsoft's MIX10 conference for Web developers in Las Vegas. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, made his bet on Internet Explorer 9 and its support of an emerging standard, HTML5.
"We've built Internet Explorer 9 from the ground up on top of the Windows 7 platform," Sinofsky said during a cameo in IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch's keynote.
As has been previously reported, IE9 – expected to be released next year – can use a computer's hardware processing power to render graphics. On stage, Hachamovitch and Sinofsky showed a number of examples in which IE9 displayed graphics more quickly and more smoothly than Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
The browser also supports HTML5, an emerging standard for writing Web pages. And with HTML5 video, another emerging Web technology, IE9's hardware-accelerated graphics rendering puts the processing strain on a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU), not the browser software.
Other browsers also support HTML5, but the language isn't fully developed and different browsers may display the same code differently.
"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script and the same markup across browsers," Hachamovitch said. "And that's a key goal for IE9. We love HTML5 so much that we want it to work. And it will in IE9."
The browser's JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, also delegates processing power to a computer's central processing unit (CPU).
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that an IE9 "platform preview" is now available for developers. It doesn't have a back button, but it does include developer tools so people who build Web pages can test out what the could do in IE9.
"We are committed to update this preview approximately every eight weeks," Hachamovitch said.
The hardware acceleration in IE9 falls in step with Microsoft's overarching strategy for the wide world of the Web. At Ballmer's cloud-computing speech two weeks ago, at the University of Washington, he said the company is focusing on how devices – PCs, smartphones, TVs or Xboxes – can be optimized for the cloud.
Many companies are focusing on the other end of things: developing the cloud so more computing can be done via remote data centers. Microsoft, Ballmer said, plans to take advantage of the cloud infrastructure and marry that with optimized devices.
Ballmer said it then; Sinofsky said it Tuesday: "We're all in."
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