Microsoft has confirmed that the beta version of IE9 will arrive on 15 September, with the company's best browser for years hoping to cause a real stir.
Microsoft is putting a huge amount of faith in its latest browser, with competition from Chrome, Safari and Firefox meaning that IE's market dominance is not longer assured.
The software giant has taken huge strides in terms of the speed of the browser, and the platform previews of IE9 have been well received – with 2.5 million downloads.
Limited invitations
Microsoft will launch IE9 at the Beauty of the Web event in San Francisco, with invitations limited.
"Starting today, a select group of VIP web developers, designers, bloggers and press begin receiving their invitations to an event we're holding in San Francisco on September 15th to celebrate the Beauty of the Web and to mark the launch of the IE9 Beta," blogged IE's James Pratt.
"Reception for IE9 has been very positive since MIX with over 2.5 million downloads of the platform previews.
"Developers are already working hard on some amazing new web experiences enabled by Internet Explorer 9. On 15 September we'll be able to show you a more beautiful web that feels native on Windows."
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si_smith
August 13th 2010
3. @northerngeek
Microsoft make great OS, Office and developer tools, everything else they do suck badly.
They should concentrate on what they are good at, and leave everything else to others.
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northerngeek
August 13th 2010
2. @si_smith
Why not just stop looking at Microsoft products, you'll never have anything positive to say about any of them obviously.
Standards compliance is one of the short-comings that people have complained about for years regarding IE and now that they're making a concentrated effort towards it you decide it's a marketting scam?
All the browsers nowadays are of comparable speeds when it comes to viewing pages, the differences become apparent when opening tabs, changing UI and loading up new sessions. I don't care about millisecond differences in load times and I don't think any reasonable person would, IE9 has fixed a lot and for that everybody (especially web designers) should be happy.
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si_smith
August 13th 2010
1. Slower than even bloated old Firefix, which is rather impressive, as I didn't think anything could be as bloated and crappy as Firefix, but IE9 even with it's much touted hardware acceleration seems to have still managed it.
http://i37.tinypic.com/setv89.png
Of course Chrome and Opera are way off in the distance in the performance stakes as usual.
In typical Microsoft style, they are papering over the cracks of a crappy product with slick marketing and nice sounding words like "standards compliance" and "hardware acceleration",
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