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At the PDC 2009 (Professional Developers Conference 2009), Microsoft spilled some details on the upcoming Internet Explorer version 9, a browser that will feature improved performance, new features, and the possibility of new standards. Microsoft started working on IE 9 from past three weeks to improve the rendering engine performance and to speed up the browsing experience for the users.a focus on improved font rendering, better standards support, and JavaScript performance.

According to the IE Blog, the Javascript rendering is faster than the its predecessor Internet Explorer 8, IE8 rendering engine performance is poor compared to the other browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Safari. But the early build of IE9 is faster than IE8 and close to other browsers performance tested with Webkit SunSpider test. The chart below shows the relative performance of different browsers on the same machine running the SunSpider test.

IE9 will support Acid3, DirectX Direct2D and other standards, including CSS3 and HTML5. This should improve the appearance of fonts and performance of text animation without requiring changes to the sites themselves.

The most interesting feature they are working on in IE9 is the graphics acceleration, IE9 can use the graphics card for the rendering graphics and text using DirectX technology installed on windows systems. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU.

You can read more from the IE team on this topic here.