Hoping to swipe a little wind from Apple's sails, Microsoft has posted a video comparing the next version of Internet Explorer to Safari 5. Despite being lauded as the swiftest browser under the sun, Safari 5 fails to trump IE9's graphics hardware acceleration in the demonstration clip embedded below. Mind you, IE9 is still in a pre-release state, so who knows where the finished product will stand, but things can only improve.
The video (requires Silverlight) depicts a couple demos from the IE9 Test Drive site, which is home to well over two dozen different browser-related tests. Of two tests shown, IE9's performance was smooth, mostly remaining above 50 frames per second in the first and 25 in the second. Meanwhile, Safari 5 was barely able to crack double digits and actually dipped to 1FPS more than once.
What does that mean for everyday browsing? Well, we'll just have to wait and see. It's worth noting that things aren't so pretty for IE9 in other benchmarks. The recently released Platform Preview build lags behind the competition in Acid3 - but again, it's not completed yet. You can download the IE9 Platform Preview here, but realize that it's a pretty raw experience right now.