LOS ANGELES -- Windows President Steve Sinofsky gave some details on the development of the next version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 9.

He said the browser would be more interoperable, and its performance would be improved from IE 8. The development team has been working on the new browser for three weeks.

IE9 will support DirectX and other standards, including CSS3, HTML5.

Sinofsky gave a brief demo of animations running in Internet Explorer 9 in his keynote today at PDC. He also showed its ability to draw rounded borders and its sharper image display.

At least in the demo, the animations ran more smoothly compared with the "ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk" of Internet Explorer 8, as Sinofsky described it.

"We intend to make sure Internet Explorer represents the very best browser for Windows and represents the most world-class browsing," Sinfosky said.

He said the devlepment team has been focusing on improving the performance of the browser as measured by Acid3 tests.

Internet Explorer, which at one point dominated the market for browsers, has been steadily losing share, mostly to Mozilla's Firefox. Microsoft has a little less than 65 percent of the market and Mozilla has 24 percent. Other competitors include Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.