W3C has announced this Web Performance Working group that will ‘provide methods to measure aspects of application performance of user agent features and APIs’. The first thing that these guys will do is recommending an API that measures the performance of browser navigations. The Web Performance group will be co-chaired with Microsoft and Google.

The specification for this is called WebTiming and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview was the first web browser to implement few portions of this WebTiming standard specifications followed by Google that has implemented these web performance standards in Chrome 6.0. The API specification is still not finalized by W3C.

We all know how much people curse Internet Explorer 8. Keeping in view the upcoming releases and news about Internet Explorer 9, it looks like Microsoft is taking Internet Explorer very seriously to compete with other web browsers that have been eating IE’s market share. The problem with earlier versions of Internet Explorer was Microsoft trying to set their own standards for web and now we see Microsoft adapting the global standards and working with W3C side by side like never before.