Microsoft announced today that Internet Explorer 9 was finished. The new web browser will be ready to download at midnight Eastern time, March 15. IE9 release is just a month after the release candidate and a year after the very earliest tech previews.
The browser presents the company’s first browser to sincerely honor web standards instead of focusing on proprietary code like ActiveX and, even in early tests, was competing in accuracy with rival browsers. Past versions have had many instances of proprietary rendering that either didn’t render standards properly or forced web developers to include exceptions to account for IE users.
Microsoft is now encouraging users to stop using IE6 to get customers towards more current and standard complainant IE9 version.
Internet Explorer has been sliding for the past few years as Firefox, Safari and eventually Chrome began adding many more features and better web rendering speed. IE9 has a much more competitive JavaScript engine with graphics-based hardware acceleration, HTML5 support and other improvements to catch up.
