Microsoft has obviously shifted its strategy when it comes to web standards. Instead of leading the web community and setting its own industrial standards, the company is now trying to be the first to implement open standards. HTML5 is the best example.
This article described the new user interface features of Internet Explorer 9: New tabs, Your Popular, Sites, Windows 7 integration (taskbar pinning), new toolbar menus. It also compares IE9 to Chrome.
This post summarizes the performance features of Internet Explorer 9: Hardware acceleration, JavaScript-Engine Chakra, modern processor instruction sets and Add-on Performance Advisor.