Microsoft today announced that their IE9 browser has nearly closed the Javascript performance gap between it and its rivals.

According to InfoWorld Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, acknowledge Microsoft had some catching up to do. "We know we have a lot of work to do in some areas of performance," Sinofsky said today at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference).

Though the browser has only been in development for a three weeks Sinofsky announced, "On SunSpider, we're on par with IE9," and showed a chart that displayed scores from the JavaScript benchmarking suite. IE9's scores were slightly higher (slower) then the rest but significantly better than IE8.

"We're getting very close to the other browsers," said Sinofsky.

Internet Explorer's Acid3 score has also improved. "We need to do a better job on Acid3," Sinofsky admitted. "We have made some improvements in IE9, which now scores 32 out of 100." IE8, he said, scored 24 out of a possible 100.

Current builds of Chrome, Safari and Opera all score 100, while Firefox 3.6, which is still in beta, makes it to 92 out of 100.

No word yet on a release date.

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