Later today in the MIX10 developer conference, Microsoft has revealed the first ever public preview of Internet Explorer Platform. No matter how hard Microsoft tries to name it in a politically correct way, it is what we’ll soon call – Internet Explorer 9!

Currently it’s just bare bones but rather impressive one at that. I downloaded the preview version, which pretty much is just the rendering engine and not the full fledged browser and am having my hands on it. Let me tell you folks if this is what the preview is, IE9 is definitely going to be ‘huge’.

First of all, IE9 Preview supports majority of the web-standards like HTML5 and thereby CSS3. For example the ‘border-radius’ property of CSS3 is now beautifully rendered in IE9 Preview. The much anticipated GPU powered sub-pixel layout capabilities will now be a part of IE9 which will use the Windows 7 Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies.

The figure to the right shows the performance graph of IE9 Platform Preview against other browsers. It clearly surpasses Opera 10.10 and even Firefox 3.7 Alpha.

In the ACID test however, the kid scores 55/100 which is in fact not too bad for a pre-alpha.

IE9 Preview basically gives the demonstration on how latest web standards will be incorporated in IE9. However, you can surf and test other websites too. Just click ‘Page’ > ‘Open’. Enter the URL of the website and click OK.

IE9 Preview hints at major breakthrough in overall performance boost compared to its predecessors and complying to the latest web-standards. Although, the developing team has declared that they will roll out browser code updates every 8 weeks with first such roll out in May, it is yet unclear when IE9 Beta will be made available to general public.

As of now, this is all you have –

Download Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview

For more details on IE9 Platform Preview, visit the official MSDN IEBlog.