MS Internet Explorer 9 RTW At SXSWi 2011

Yesterday at SXSW Interactive, Microsoft officially released the final version of Internet Explorer 9 browser, onto the web for download. This version (the RTW/RTM) has a build number of 8112.16421 and is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. IE9 is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2. Insisting that it must have graphics hardware acceleration, Microsoft had already said IE9 is not compatible with Windows XP.

The latest version of Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer 9, has been teased to an eager audience over the past year. Finally, it seemed, Microsoft would have a browser that was secure, standards-compliant, fast (with GPU hardware acceleration), yet compatible with legacy websites/intranets. IE9 manages to deliver to a large extent on each of these factors and went further, with a minimalist user interface that receded into the background, focused on helping the user where necessary but brought the webpage/Internet to the foreground.

But for all this, Internet Explorer did pay a price. The code/HTML rendering engine had already changed with previous versions. The interface became almost alien to the old faithful that was familiar with the IE6 UI. An almost disbanded IE team was brought back to life, and Microsoft actually found itself interacting with users who had defected to other browsers, with developers of browsers and webpages... eventually mounting a campaign to get people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 (being now non-standards compliant) and move on to newer versions.

Of course, IE9 is not perfect. It only scores 95/100 in the Acid3 test for CSS3 compliance. As a user of the IE9 beta/RC builds, I can attest that numbers are not everything and the experience has been smooth with neither compatibility issues (easily fixed) nor the slow page rendering earlier attributed to IE. Microsoft has quite a campaign going, with its "Beauty of the Web" demos and showcase sites, but that is more of eye-candy than functional for a purpose, at the moment.

What about the vocal crowd that wanted Microsoft to junk Internet Explorer, and start with something else from scratch, which was entirely new? In almost every sense of the term, IE9 meets that demand, except that it retains the IE brand. In its new avatar, might it end up neither pleasing the vocally radical crowd, nor the conservative corporate/home users? That will be the billion-user question, key to IE9 adoption and market share.

Useful IE9 Links
Internet Explorer Team Blog
IE9 Release Notes
IE9 Product Guide
Internet Explorer 9 Home
Direct Download of IE9 - Win7 32-bit/64-bit, Vista 32-bit/64-bit