Microsoft Session at Cloud Expo

What with the Ballot Screen circulating in Europe, its search interests to advance, and a new class of applications on the doorstep, Microsoft says it's throwing more HTML5 support as well as a faster new rival-challenging JavaScript engine code named Chakra, support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and text and supposedly ground-breaking safety features into its next-generation web browser Internet Explorer 9 so it can get back in the game.

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Long criticized for not supporting web standards Microsoft now evidently wants HTLM5 - still not a standard, mind you - to get traction so that web applications and web sites only have to be programmed once and rivals like Chrome, Firefox and Opera have less of a reason for being.

On the other hand, it also makes it easier for them to all co-exist.

IE9 is still months from release but there's a preview for developers to download, with updates every two months until the thing ships, whenever that is.

It requires Vista SP2 or higher. It doesn't run on XP.

Microsoft says it will contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library - like how it works with ASP.NET - and share the release of new SDKs for the Open Data Protocol (OData) to make it easier for developers to access data from the cloud to create cross-platform web applications.

It said it would package the jQuery JavaScript Library with Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 and contribute a templating engine to simplify web applications.

As part of what Microsoft called its commitment to interoperability, it said it would support CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard (H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC) codecs.