Microsoft will launch its public beta of Internet Explorer 9 on Sept. 15,
with a high-profile event in San Francisco.
During the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting on July 29, Microsoft COO
Kevin Turner had suggested the IE9 beta would arrive in September but offered
no further details. Microsoft released IE9's fourth and final Platform Preview
to developers Aug. 4, with features such as native JavaScript integration and
fully hardware-accelerated HTML5.
"The fourth Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now,
shows the opportunity of fully hardware-accelerated HTML5," Dean
Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, wrote in
an Aug. 4 posting on the Windows Internet Explorer Weblog. "You can
run new test drive samples that show modern SVG and native JavaScript
integration in action. … With this installment, you will find more performance
and more support in the same markup." That JavaScript integration,
apparently, allows IE9 to achieve greater speeds than its predecessors.
The IE9 Platform Preview 4 can
be downloaded from this Website.
While rival browsers such as Firefox and Chrome offer strong challenges in
the browser space, Internet Explorer has managed to make incremental gains with
regard to overall users. Analytics firm Net Applications estimated Internet
Explorer's share of the July browser market at 60.74 percent—a slight increase
from June's 60.32 percent—followed by Firefox with 22.91 percent, Chrome with
7.16 percent, Safari with 5.09 percent and Opera with 2.45 percent.
Internet Explorer 8 has seen an increase in user adoption, while the
respective market shares for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to decline.
Microsoft executives keep suggesting that the latter versions' market erosion
is a natural trend. Despite their encouraging users to migrate to the browser's
newest versions, however, the company also intends to support the increasingly
antiquated Internet Explorer 6 through April 2014.
Despite those user gains, Internet Explorer faces some controversy over its
privacy policies. An
Aug. 1 article in The Wall Street Journal alleged that company executives
had killed the IE development team's attempt to create software that
counteracts common tracking tools, apparently because such programming would
interfere with their online-ad selling operation.
As the issue gained traction online, Microsoft
insisted in an Aug. 1 corporate blog posting that "browsing the Web is
fundamentally an information exchange" and that "your Web browser
offers information in order to get information." Executives have also
called attention to Internet Explorer's InPrivate Filtering, which lets users
regulate their privacy settings.
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