Future of IE9: Opacity + Performance

Question

I just tried the IE9 "Second Internet Explorer Platform Preview" - which supports CSS opacity now. That's nice, but I tried it with one of my website prototypes, and it's quite slow when scrolling etc.

Admittedly, the prototype uses hundreds of images with opacity != 1, but everything is snappy with current versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

Does anybody know, if there are plans for IE9 to become faster in this area? Even rumours about this would be interesting in this case.

Note: I'm asking, because I want to optimize the site early for future developments, and it has side-effects on planning server resources: Will I have to serve lots of different versions of the image for different opacities, ...

Answer 1

The IE9 previws are just that - VERY early previews illustrating the current state of the (very significant) work going on in IE9. The previews aren't even alpha-quality code yet, much less beta.

The performance of IE9 and it compliance with the HTML5 spec du jour is improving daily. Expect continued improvements as new previews ship.

If you have concerns about the performance of IE9 with one of your scenarios, be sure to let the team know over at the IE9 Connect site: http://connect.microsoft.com/ie