Despite holding the lion's share of the market, Microsoft's current web-browser lags far behind the competition in terms of both features and speed. However, the company hopes that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will rectify this and finally make it worthy of having the world's most-popular browser.
While IE9 isn't due to be released until the start of next year, a string of very-early developer releases have been made available by Microsoft. The latest of these came out last month, and a public beta was expected to be released sometime in August.
However, we now confirmation from company COO, Kevin Turner, that the beta will be released at some point in September. Talking at the annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Turner admitted that the company was facing challenges in the browser space, but had high hopes for the new version, especially following IE's jump in popularity recently.
The COO told analysts "it's a whole new day. And where we're going with IE9 and what we're going to do from an HTML 5 standard standpoint and where we're going from a speed standpoint, we're really going in a big way in this space this next year and have a great story to tell including around safety and security in the browser space".
As well as a massive speed boost over IE8, the latest version of Internet Explorer will bring a host of new features. These include a brand-new JavaScript engine that supports GPU acceleration, support for HTML5 and CSS3 and compatibility with the WebM video standard.
Will you be lining up to try the new version of the browser when the beta drops in September? Or do you think that Microsoft should just throw in the towel and put Internet Explorer out to pasture? Let us know your thoughts in the HEXUS.community.
