Microsoft is previewing Internet Explorer 9 - and it promises to add a stack of new technologies that may make it one of the most advanced browsers out there. No, really.

Among the elements that Microsoft is touting are SVG (scalable vector graphics) capability, background compiled Javascript for greater speed, and - gasp! - HTML5 integration. So at Mix10, where it was first shown off on stage, people got to see it playing a YouTube video... without using Flash.

Which is of course going to add mightily to the debate about whether Flash is dying, dead but doesn't know it, alarmingly healthy but just being overlooked by these whippersnappers, or simply going to evolve and be a happy shiny part of the future web as we know it.

IE9's adoption of newer technologies, and technologies such as SVG which have been around for ages but not had that special Microsoft embrace, certainly makes it look like the company is trying to catch up and even overtake a lot of the other rival browsers out there.

But it's still struggling a bit on some of the CSS parts - notably the W3C's evil Acid3 test (warning: page will be slow as your browser chugs through the 100-part test) [nah, just my browser having a sulky moment], on which it only scores 55 out of 100. (Firefox 3.6 scores 94 92, while Apple's Safari 4 scores 100/100.) Then again, that's better than IE8, which only managed 20/100.

The big change though is the move towards HTML5, which hadn't frankly been expected.

Last November Dean Hachamovich noted on the Microsoft Developer Network blog that

"Our focus is providing rich capabilities – the ones that most developers want to use – in an interoperable way. Developers want more capabilities in the browser to build great apps and experiences; they want them to work in an interoperable way so they don't have to re-write and re-test their sites again and again. The standards process offers a good means to that end"

However Jeffrey Zeldman is less impressed:

"Microsoft's marketing department wants the public to believe that IE and Windows are profoundly innovative. Thus efforts to catch up to the typographic legibility and beauty of Mac OS X and Webkit browsers are presented, in Dean Hachamovitch's blog post, as leading-edge innovations. Don't get me wrong: these improvements are desirable, and Direct2D may be great. I'm not challenging the quality of the hardware and software improvements; I'm pointing out the enforced bragging, which is mandated from on high, and which flies in the face of the humble stance other high-level divisions in Microsoft would like to enforce in the wake of the company's European drubbing and the dents Apple and Google have made on its monopoly and invulnerability."

Well, it has to be said that the principal dent that's been put in Microsoft's monopoly have come from the European Commission and, to a lesser extent, the US Department of Justice; and that following that it's been Firefox (which, it's true, does get funding from Google via its built-in search box). It's interesting to try to figure out quite what has dented Microsoft's monopoly: its profits aren't going down, its cash pile is still vast, and it's still the predominant operating system on the desktop (or laptop).

Even so, Zeldman concludes:

"By torturing the IE rendering engine every couple of years instead of putting it out of its misery, Microsoft contributes to the withering away of its own monopoly. That might not be good for the shareholders, but it is great for everyone else."

The reality is though that it's things like the browser ballot screen that are really going to make the difference to IE's monopoly. But with that said, one has to welcome a browser from Microsoft that incorporates emerging web standards. Now let's hope that all the people stuck on IE6 can upgrade...