Internet Explorer 9 to Launch on March 14, 2011

Microsoft announced Wednesday that it would officially launch its next web browser, Internet Explorer (IE) 9, next week—on March 14, 2011. The final IE 9 release will thus ship almost exactly one year after the first IE 9 platform preview was unveiled, and about a year and a half after the browser was originally demoed during the Windows 7 launch in October 2009.

"On Monday, March 14, we will celebrate the developers and designers who are making a more beautiful web for all of us," Microsoft Program Manager Ryan Gavin wrote in a blog post. "We will release the final version of Internet Explorer 9 for download beginning at 9pm Pacific."

A year earlier, Microsoft released the IE 9 platform preview build for developers at its MIX'10 show in Las Vegas. But with MIX'11 pushed back a month to April this year, the IE 9 final launch will coincide with the South By Southwest (SXSW) show in Austin, Texas. So, Microsoft will hold a live event and party at SXSW to celebrate that launch.

IE 9 has come a long way in the past year. The initial platform preview build was followed at regular intervals by several other platform preview releases, and the company issued a public beta in September 2010, followed by a feature-complete release candidate (RC) build in early February. IE 9 focuses on an end-to-end modernization of Microsoft's browser, with a deeply improved, standards-compliant rendering and JavaScript engines, hardware acceleration, and interesting Windows 7 UI integration features.

For Microsoft, a year-and-a-half turnaround is amazingly fast on a product as important as IE, but it's not all good news. During that time, overall IE usage has fallen dramatically (though the most recent version, IE 8, has actually gained share on rivals). And Microsoft's faster-moving competitors are squeezing out new releases at a much faster clip: In the past year alone, for example, Google has shipped seven major versions of the Chrome web browser. (If anything, Chrome development may actually be too fast: Perhaps there is a happy middle ground between IE 9 and Chrome.)

Top 10 Reasons to Like IE 9

1. Standards Compliance
   The Microsoft IE 9 team submitted tests for various Web specs that are either unratified or in transition. Their focus has been to seek compliance with HTML5, SVG 1.1, CSS 3.0, ECMAScript 5 and DOM L2 and L3 specs. Microsoft officials say that developers only have to write their code once and it will run across all browsers.
2. Hardware Accelerated Graphics
   IE 9 can power HTML5-coded audio and video using the device's underlying hardware. Multimedia can run natively in IE 9 without relying on add-ons such as Flash or Silverlight. IE 9 taps into the device's graphics processing unit (GPU) to optimize performance.
3. Google UI
   The new Microsoft browser adopts the "popular sites" opening screen seen in Google Chrome. IE 9 also lets users search the Web using the address bar (or "One Box," as Microsoft terms it) of the browser, a feature seen in Google Chrome.
4. Windows UI
   Features introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Vista can be seen in IE 9, such as the ability to pin Web sites to the taskbar as if they were applications. Developers can associate "jumplists" (a Windows term for a series of links) with pinned sites to facilitate navigation.
5. Chakra!
   Let's face it, IE 8 is slow. IE 9 uses a new JavaScript engine called "Chakra" to speed performance. Chakra is capable of taking advantage of multi-core hardware.
6. Architecture
   The IE 9 team moved the processing of JavaScript closer to the Document Object Model (DOM) in the IE 9 beta, which has resulted in speed improvements. Microsoft tests show that IE 9 equals or surpasses competing browsers in terms of speed.
7. Performance Advice
   Microsoft included an "add-on performance advisor" in IE 9 that tells users when third-party additions are slowing the browser's performance.
8. Better Security for Downloads
   IE 9 includes a new download manager that uses the Microsoft "smartscreen filter" to alert users when a download originates from an unfamiliar or untrusted source.
9. Tab Isolation
   Microsoft claims that tab isolation is a new feature in IE 9. It provides for automatic crash recovery and hang recovery when Web sites fail.
10. Management and Dev Features
    Hitting the F12 key lets Web developers debug their code or check performance issues. Developers can control how their Web sites appear by falling back to earlier Internet Explorer versions using IE 9 compatibility-mode settings. IT pros can set Group Policy for IE 9, with more than 1,500 options, including control over browser add-ons. IE 9 will support slipstream installations, allowing IT pros to include updates in distributions.

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