Microsoft said that its next browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), almost closed the gap in productivity between JavaScript and IE competitors developed by Mozilla and Google, despite the fact that the new Microsoft browser is under construction just a few weeks.

Steven Sinofsky, vice-president of Microsoft, responsible for the development of Windows, admitted that Microsoft broke away from the competition and forced them to catch up. "We know that we have a lot of work to increase productivity", ─ stated Sinofsky at the Professional Developers Conference (Professional Developers Conference, PDC).Show results from popular test package JavaScript, Sinofsky said that "in terms of SunSpider, we IE9 on an equal footing" with other browsers. Although IE9 was somewhat slower than the competition, its results were significantly better than the results IE8, the current browser, Microsoft.

For a company Mozilla these data do not become news, because Mozilla has already predicted that the next iteration of IE will show some performance gain, because Microsoft must compensate for the time when the largest producer of software virtually abandoned their favorite browser, and then made a rather clumsy attempt to update.

Modern browsers are Microsoft, including IE8 and even more so IE7 and earlier versions such as the widely used IE6, to say the least, inferior in terms of JavaScript competitors, in particular, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. The latter two are based on the browser engine WebKit open source. In the same SunSpider browser Chrome is about 10 times faster than IE8, Firefox and IE8 faster almost four times. Previously, Microsoft says such tests are wrong and far from reality, but for performance statistics would take the real speed of loading 25 sites in different browsers.

Now it seems that Sinofsky has waived this position, and boasts about how IE9 fast, and how good his results in synthetic tests like Acid3. This test checks how well your browser meets certain standards, particularly specifications for Web 2.0, as well as standards related to the DOM (Document Object Model), CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). According to Sinofsky, IE9 in Acid3 gaining 32 points out of 100, while IE8 shows 24 out of 100. However, other browsers in the Acid3 show more than excellent results. Current build Chrome, Safari and Opera pass the test on 100, while Firefox 3.6, which is still in beta, gives 92 out of 100.

Sinofsky did not speak about the production schedule IE9 and that when the beta version of the browser will be available to users. According to him, actually a new browser developed by only three weeks since, was released, Windows 7. For lack of a network of at least some versions of the browser of the future is impossible to confirm the claim Sinofsky at the top IE9 based on JavaScript and Acid3.