Today, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch posted a follow-up: HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers. Yes, you can now download what Microsoft calls a Platform Preview to test drive Internet Explorer 9 for yourself.

There are also a number of demos to show the improved performance and standards support in IE 9. Judging by several of the demos (HTML5 T-Shirt Designer and SVG-oids are two) it looks like IE9 will finally support XHTML served with the application/xhtml+xml media type. We’ll never know, but I can’t help wondering if the number of people using “real” XHTML would have been greater if Microsoft had implemented support for that earlier.

One of the things that Microsoft claims will be improved in IE9 is type rendering, which I’m looking forward to a lot. To my (admittedly Mac OS X-conditioned) eyes the whole of Windows needs to catch up there.

As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in IE9 preview:

Thus efforts to catch up to the typographic legibility and beauty of Mac OS X and Webkit browsers are presented, in Dean Hachamovitch’s blog post, as leading-edge innovations.

Type rendering aside, it’s promising to see more information about IE9. Let’s hope Microsoft can live up to what Dean Hachamovitch writes in today’s blog post:

We want the same markup to just work across different browsers. In IE9, we’re doing for the rest of the platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. IE8 delivered a high-quality CSS 2.1 implementation, sticking to the standard, and looking to other implementations in places where the standard is ambiguous.

I’m still amazed at how few IE8 problems related to CSS 2.1 I have run into. If IE9 can deliver that level of support for HTML5, DOM, CSS3, and SVG… yay!

Makes me wonder how long it will take for IE8 to be phased out.

IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 – It’s so crazy!

Opera Software’s newest browser, Opera 10 with Turbo, was downloaded 10 million times during the first week of release. With record download rates, Opera 10 is already in use by millions of users around the world.

New to the Opera 10 browser is the concept of turbo browsing under circumstances of low bandwidth. Low bandwidth is a universal factor in multiple browsing situations, for example, on a train, in a hotel or in areas with limited connectivity. With the launch of Opera 10 with Turbo, Opera has pointedly addressed the needs of Web users when browsing on slow or congested networks.

• Exclusive Opera Turbo compression boosts slow connection speeds
• Innovative visual tabs displays Web sites in thumbnails
• Intuitive, sleek design
• Easy-to-personalize Speed Dial visual bookmarks
• Everything built-in, no need for extensions
• It’s free!

To rescue the web designers from this aching job of testing browser compatibility in different browsers there are few websites which offer this service. On these websites you can check the compatibility of your website in all desired browsers. You can find these websites below:

Browsershots	Browsershots
Spoon	CrossBrowserTesting
NetRenderer	Litmus
BrowserCam

Private Browsing
Sometimes it’s nice to go undercover. When this feature is enabled, you won’t leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover. You can slip in and out of private browsing mode quickly, so it’s easy to return to what you were doing before as if nothing ever happened (you can also browse privately all the time).

Forget This Site
Having second thoughts about having visited a certain Web site? With this feature, you can remove every trace of that site from your browser—no questions asked!

Super Speed
Fasten your seatbelt: Firefox 3.5 includes the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which gives the browser dramatically better performance than ever before. Firefox has always been fast, but this is the fastest Firefox ever (more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2), meaning Web applications like email, photo sites, online word processors and more will feel snappier and more responsive.

Easy Organization
Get your sites in order. Simply arrange the order of your tabs by dragging them in one swift move of your mouse. Or, if your browser window is getting cluttered with too many tabs, just drag a tab out of its existing spot and it will automatically open up in a new window.

Downloadable Fonts
View a wider variety of fonts on Web sites while you surf. Site designers and developers can create custom fonts that will be displayed and rendered properly even if you don’t have the font installed on your computer.

Location-Aware Browsing
Now Firefox can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants near you). It’s all optional – Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission – and is done with the utmost respect for your privacy.

Open Video and Audio
Introducing the future of online media! Firefox is the first browser to support open video and audio formats, allowing practically limitless new ways for sites to display rich content. The open formats also allow modern web pages to display media without requiring a plug-in or a proprietary software download.

And many other… Read more here

• Crash in nsTextFrame::ClearTextRun()
• Fixed a major stability issue.

You can read more here

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies.(bug 470578)
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display. (bug 482659)
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit. (bug 426991)
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus. (bug 446568)
• See the Firefox 3.0.8 release notes for changes in previous releases.

You can read more here

SeaMonkey 1.1.16 closes a few critical security vulnerabilities found in previous versions. With that, SeaMonkey offers the same level of security as its sibling Firefox 3, which has issued updates for the same problems recently as well.

• XSL Transformation vulnerability

Read more here.

IETester

In my opinion, each xhtml coder needs software for testing web-pages for various Internet Explorer versions . If you use standard methods and install all IEs, then one cannot guarantee the quality of work of the web-pages.

Here is the tester I have found for myself: IE Tester

IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

But this soft has small bugs.

Known problems and limitations :

• The Previous/Next buttons are not working properly
• Focus is not working properly
• Java applets are not working
• Flash is not working on IE6 instance in user mode : A solution is to launch IETester as admin user and Flash will work.
• CSS Filters are not working correctly in user mode : A solution is to launch IETester as admin user and CSS Filters will work.
• PNG transparent do not work correctly.

PS: those who are interested in this information, please contact me, as I have got a portable version IE7 and IE8, which work with any Windows without installation and even using it from your flash.

• Arbitrary code execution through XUL element
• XSL Transformation vulnerability

Critical: Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

Please, read more here.

SeaMonkey 1.1.15 closes several security vulnerabilities and fixes several smaller problems found in previous versions. With that, SeaMonkey stays at the same level of security as its siblings Thunderbird 2 and Firefox 3, which are or have been issuing updates for the same problems shortly as well.

Fixed in SeaMonkey 1.1.15

• Upgrade PNG library to fix memory safety hazards
• XML data theft via RDFXMLDataSource and cross-domain redirect
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption
• XMLHttpRequest allows reading HTTPOnly cookies
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.6)

Read more here.