With the Wednesday launch of the third preview of the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform, the Microsoft IE team has kept its word about releasing an update of IE9 after every eight weeks. The third preview launches with support HTML 5 video and audio.

In addition, via the latest IE9 Platform Preview, Microsoft has also notably enhanced IE9’s speed and support for Web standards, including the Canvas bitmap graphics drawing standard or the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).

During the recent demonstrations showing the performance of the IE9’s third platform preview, Ryan Gavin, the IE senior director, confirmed at a media event in San Francisco, that the IE9 will support the Canvas graphics technology and the video and audio tags specified as part of the still-developing HTML5 standard.

In addition, during a Tuesday conference call, Rob Mauceri - Microsoft's principal group program manager for Internet Explorer - said: “With this update, we continue the pattern around ‘same markup,’ performance, and hardware acceleration that we’ve talked about to date with IE9.”

Mauceri further added that, as a result of the brower’s latest build of the Chakra JavaScript engine, the speed of the test browser’s performance on WebKit’s SunSpider JavaScript benchmark was enhanced by nearly 25 percent. The speed up in performance puts the Microsoft browser within 20 milliseconds of Safari 5; and ahead of Chrome 4 and Firefox 3.6 browsers.