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Code complete: IE9 on Windows Phone 7

We might get a shipping date for the Windows Phone Mango update from Microsoft this week, but Joe Marini, Principal Program Manager for IE on Windows Phone, told TechRadar last week that IE9 for Windows Phone is already "code complete; we are now debugging, we are performance tuning. Graphics performance is a big focus for us right now. That, rendering compatibility, markup compatibility - any rendering issues are really getting looked at closely right now."

Hardware accelerated browsing (including video, audio, text, canvas, drawing and general rendering) is one of the major improvements in IE9.

When Microsoft first showed off the hardware acceleration in IE9 mobile earlier this year, it was getting 23 frames per second in Microsoft's 'speed reading' demo (compared to 11fps on Android and 2 on iPhone).

"That's just what we got by the GPU acceleration being there," Marini said, before the team starting working on any performance improvements; now it's up to 27fps.

FAST FLIP: The speed reading performance test on mobile IE9 is up to 27fps from 23

There are other performance improvements since the earlier demo. "We took a holistic view of performance in the world of mobile where you have got spotty data connections or network congestion. We have a nice tiled rendering experience where as the site is coming down, we detect where a user is scrolling in the page and we provide those tiles first."

Despite having a version of the Chakra JavaScript engine and the same layout engine as IE9 for Windows ("We're sharing the same code base. If something renders on IE9 desktop it should render on the phone as well," promises Marini), the phone version isn't identical by any means.

That wasn't the goal. "Same markup does not mean you can mark up a site [in HTML5] and it automatically works on mobile - same markup means it should work across different platforms."

Designed differently

With a smaller screen size and users who are more likely to be doing something specific, mobile sites work better if they're designed differently.

"When you're using the web on a mobile device, it's an adjunct to what you're already doing. If I'm at the bar with my friends I might be transferring money from my savings account to my checking account so I can pay the tab but that's not the reason why I'm there.

"And if I'm on the bus and there area lot of people around me I might hesitate to log in to my banking site if it dumps me straight into my account page with all this information visible; you might want to send then to an initial page that has less sensitive information.