Internet Explorer 9 Now Ready for You to Test Drive

SAN FRANCISCO--Just days after launching Internet Explorer 8 in March 2009, Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch wrote a memo about what the company really needed to do with the next version of its browser.

"A browser is only as good as the underlying operating system," Hachamovitch said in an e-mail to the Internet Explorer team and others at Microsoft. "We have amazing opportunities to differentiate IE because of the underlying strengths of Windows. Our broad opportunity is making Windows the best place to experience the web."

Internet Explorer, he knew, needed to run much faster, to be much more standards compliant, and really harness the power of the PC.

Fast forward 18 months and Microsoft now has a public beta of the browser that achieves several of the goals that Hachamovitch laid out in his memo. Internet Explorer 9 has better support for HTML 5 and other Web standards, taps the PC graphics chip for hardware acceleration, and includes a much faster JavaScript engine.

On the visual front, the new browser has a minimalist approach. As first reported by CNET last month, the design principle for the new browser was creating a theater with individual Web sites as the stars of the show. Indeed, a good chunk of Wednesday's beta launch event will be focused on the work done by the various Web site creators that Microsoft has lined up to support IE9's new features.

Hachamovitch says it is fitting that the launch of the IE9 beta is taking place in the working-class, industrial South of Market section of San Francisco rather than a flashier locale like Union Square. The downscale digs reflect the fact that IE 9 tries to do its job without attracting much attention. "This is not an Armani neighborhood," he said Tuesday in an interview at the launch site here.

The launch of a new version of Internet Explorer comes as the browser race has become increasingly competitive and strategically important. Microsoft's browser, though still the market leader with about 60 percent of the market, has been ceding share for years, first to Mozilla's Firefox and more recently to Google's Chrome.

You can read the full story at CNET