Although many of us have long-abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives like Firefox, Opera or Chrome, Microsoft is working hard on the next version of its browser to redeem themselves with early adopters and retain its still dominant market share. The company has thus far been offering only stripped down platform previews of Internet Explorer 9 on its Test Drive page, but according to Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner the first beta release should be out in little over a month.
Turner revealed the September date for Wall Street analysts during the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) in Redmond, Washington. Although no other details were shared, we are hoping to finally get a taste of the new version's look and feel. Internet Explorer 9 is expected to offer broader support of HTML5 along with other standards, hardware acceleration, better tab management, and more. The browser also features a new script engine, dubbed Chakra, which delivers performance to within 50 milliseconds of Safari, Opera and Chrome on SunSpider benchmarks.
No release date has been announced for the final code, but it's likely that won't arrive until 2011. If you want to check out Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3 in the meantime, a download link is available here.