IE 9 Beta Launch Date Announced

Number 9...Number 9...Number 9... Okay, now that I've got the obligatory Beatles reference out of the way, Microsoft announced on its Windows Team Blog that it will launch Internet Explorer 9 at a media event in San Francisco on September 15.

Microsoft announced a "platform preview" of IE 9 back in March. The Platform Preview was basically the IE 9 rendering engine presented in a plain window--no toolbars, no extra features. IE 9 will feature better support for new Web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. It'll also provide hardware acceleration for rendering graphics and text on a Web page and a faster JavaScript engine for better Web app performance, among other features.

We don't yet know what the IE 9 interface will look like, or what other features it'll have, so we'll have to wait until next month for that.

For more on Microsoft's "Beauty of the Web" IE 9 launch event, see the Windows Team Blog. And see our earlier post on the IE 9 Platform Preview for additional details.