With much curiosity I took a look at the recently published IE 9 HTML5/CSS3 spec specifically to find Canvas support information. Its no secret that Steve and I are deep into a book for O’Reilly on the Canvas and IE has been a major sticking point as we progress through the chapters.

Here is the most interesting thing  I found in this document the MSDN site.

“Internet Explorer 9 Beta introduces support for the canvas element, using the 2D Canvas drawing API as its only supported context. Like all the graphics in Internet Explorer 9 Beta, canvas is hardware that is accelerated by using Windows and the GPU.”

This is a very important point as we have seen some good, but not overly great performance from the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers. I don’t know if any of those offer GPU support, but it will be nice to test out the apps we have been working on to see how they perform on IE 9. One place that performance is not very good is Mobile Safari. Hopefully the mobile version of IE9 will offer better performance on other mobile platforms.

In the coming weeks we will test drive the IE9 Beta and report back how the performance ranks against the other Canvas enabled browsers.