Internet Explorer 9 beta to ship September 15
updated 05:30 pm EDT, Thu August 12, 2010
IE9 beta officially ready in a month
Microsoft today said it would post its first true beta of Internet Explorer 9 on September 15. The browser will be accompanied by a special event in San Francisco and has had a unique tie-in through invitations: those attending the event have to use a browser with HTML5 support to solve a quiz and RSVP for the event.
IE9 is poised to be Microsoft's first truly accurate web browser and will support many modern rendering techniques in addition to HTML5 code. It promises a speed boost with a much faster JavaScript engine, and some web code will get hardware graphics acceleration that could enable more offline-quality effects and features.
The company has been trailing most of its competitors in these areas and is one of the last to implement some form of HTML5 as well as a web rendering engine that can draw pages quickly. GPU acceleration is still rare but already exists in Windows through Apple's Safari.
