Web is abuzz with the release of Internet Explorer 9. The main highlight is its support for open technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, very technologies that are at the base of 3DTin. It didn’t take me more than an hour to get 3DTin working with IE9.
3DTin also runs on older versions of IE – namely IE7 and IE8. It uses excanvas library to emulate HTML5 canvas on top of Microsoft’s VML layer. Although it is enough to load and display the sketch, it’s very slow. It’s not usable to browse or edit complicated sketches that take multiple writes to canvas. But that changes with IE9. When you load 3DTin in IE9, it looks no different than Chrome, Firefox or Safari. The browsing and editing of sketches is also as nimble as Chrome. I tested it in a virtual machine and it was reasonably fast, so I am sure on native installations it will be even faster with hardware acceleration support of IE9. If you try it, let me know.
3DTin 