@borg:
We developed a new tool some weeks ago. Because this was an internal tool we optimized it for IE7 and FF2. We also used PNGs for layout, icons and gfx-effects.
It was very cool to play with png - lot of things we can't do this easy way without png.
But we found a problem:
If you use a PNG-based layout and for example have a javascript fadein or similiar effect the IE rendering engine slows down very much. We tested this effect on a highend machine - same effect! There is no problem with firefox. For me it looks like they have implemented PNG support as easy they can - it's not fully implemented, it's like an overlay :(
So please be careful if you use PNG in V9 - we switched back to GIF and everything is fine now. The only problem is, that we have to create GIF-images for each color instead of creating one PNG with a transparency of 30%...
Just a info for you - whatever your decision will be, we'll use V9 anyway =)
Chris