Had I known that Microsoft was planning on releasing another platform preview of IE9, I'd have waited before publishing yesterday's post on the performance of filters in the major browsers. There doesn't appear to be any support for the filters, but there is a huge jump in the level of support for SVG.

Consider the results seen in IE9 Platform Preview 2:

Now look at the same page, rendered in IE9 Platform Preview 3:

What a difference! In this particular example, I'd say this compares almost identically to Safari's support - I've used the Windows version to take this screenshot so that you don't see the difference between Helvetica and Arial on the OS X version:

Forgiving a couple of artefacts on the pie vectors, this is stellar stuff from Microsoft - and about bloody time too!