I know you already know about IE9 Preview 3 being available, I’ve just been a bit bogged down in those activities that shall be known as “planning” which is more of a time sink that you might think. If you’re thinking “he’s just been watching the footy” then you’re cynical but astute.

If I was more social media savvy, I’d probably invent some sort of concept around “late-blogging”: the process of not stressing over the realtime news like the Twitterati, or live-blogging on your knee in the dark instead of enjoying the event, but rather doing the whole thing at a leisurely pace and hoovering up the (altogether vaster) long tail audience. But I’m not.

There’s a bunch of information on this particular preview at the IE Blog (surprisingly enough) and Sara answered a few questions she heard quite frequently at WebDirections the other week. I’m delighted that we’re moving in this direction with IE9 from a personal perspective (I am a lapsed web developer dontcha know?) and it seems that that’s the case as I see both Mashable and even Tim Anderson being positive.

For me, the things that stand out are the Acid3 compliancy - moving along nicely at 83/100 - and the implementation of Canvas, video, audio and Web Fonts.

Try it out – it’s side by side so won’t ruin your day! Loads of great HTML5 and JS demos.

Sidenote: If you are working with IE8 then MikeO has just published some info and practices on a load of development we’ve seen this year from customers.