Microsoft has announced that IE9 will be available on March 14, According to their blog. Microsoft plans to debut the browser at the SXSW (South by Southwest Conference and Festivals) conference in Austin on March 14, and the browser will be available for download that same evening.
Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft's biggest Web browser redesign yet. The redesign takes on a minimalist look, which gives the user more browsing room by squashing menu space. It accomplishes this by using a single bar for URLs and searches -- Google Chrome-style -- and by placing browser tabs in a single strip alongside the omnibar.
IE9 also fuses with Windows, allowing you to pin Website shortcuts to the Windows taskbar and create lists of links from within those pinned sites. There's also a download manager -- at last. As for performance, IE9 supports hardware acceleration for HTML5 video.
IE 9 does what no Microsoft browser has done before -- embraces HTML 5. HTML 5 is the latest greatest version of HTML, the core coding language for the web. With HTML 5, rich media web sites with stronger animation are made possible.
One of the key new features in IE9 is Tracking Protection. This feature was originally planned for IE8, but Microsoft held off on executing the software that lets customers control tracking on web sites. Essentially, Tracking Protection lets consumers filter content in a page that may have an impact on their privacy.
IE9 also offers InPrivate Browsing, another feature to help consumers control what their machine remembers about browsing sessions. InPrivate Filtering was a forerunner of Tracking Protection.
"This is Microsoft's comeback platform. They've broken from the pack and the end result is that it's incredibly fast," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at The Enderle Group. "It's probably one of the most secure products Microsoft has ever brought out."
Beyond speed, security and privacy features, Enderle said Microsoft has something else important in the realm of web browsers: massive developer support to use the underpinning features. That means there should be a number of web sites at launch that make unique use of some of the performance and graphics capabilities of the product.
"This is probably going to be one of Microsoft's strongest launches ever and probably one of the most important IE launches since IE 3 when Microsoft stepped away from Spyglass," Enderle said. "So this is very critical one for Microsoft and one where the company is taking a pretty big risk by jumping out so far ahead of the other guys with regard to technology."
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