Earlier this month, Microsoft issued its second developer-oriented preview release of Internet Explorer 9.0. You can take it out for a test-drive or see the demos on the test site, which displays performance enhancements, HTML5 interoperability (causing a bit of a stir), and graphical demonstrations.

Yielding to Standards
In a quest to amend the company's reputation for ignoring Web standards, Microsoft has provided more than 7,000 new compliance tests to the W3C, the standards body in charge of finalizing the in-progress HTML5 and CSS3 standards. Microsoft hopes its support for HTML5, DOM, and CSS3, in addition to new compatibility with a host of other standards-based HTML, scripting, and formatting, wil improve its Acid3 scores (a common though oft-criticized test of standards compliance for browsers). Currently, the IE9 beta scores of 68 out of 100, a far cry from Firefox 3.6's score of 94 but a huge jump from IE8's score of 20 and IE7's score of 14.

More: http://pcworld.com/article/196699/