I’ve heard some rumors that Microsoft was planning a new release of Internet Explorer 9 to go live today at the Professional Developers Conference 2010, and even speculation that it was the second Beta development milestone of IE9.
It turns out that this time around the rumors were only half true.
A new release of Internet Explorer 9 is indeed available for download, but it’s not IE9 Beta 2.
Users interested in test driving Beta of Internet Explorer 9 will still have to rely on
Build 9.0.7930.16406 offered to the public on September 15th.
And you’d be joining the users that are already playing around with this very broad Beta, and they’re quite a few.
The software giant just announced that
IE9 Beta was downloaded in excess of 10 million times since mid-September, yes, in just six weeks.
However, early adopters that are more technical as well as developers can now test drive a new development milestone of the next major iteration of IE, namely IE9 Platform Preview 6 (PP6).
What does IE9 PP6 bring to the table? Well, this is a developer release, so obviously, there are dev goodies to test.
Among the new features introduced in Platform Preview 7 is support for CSS3 2D transforms and semantic tags.
Microsoft has also updated the
IE9 test Drive website. The new IE9 PP6 bits are available for download, but there are also new tests for early adopters to try.
The video embedded at the bottom of the article offers insight into the difference between Internet Explorer 9 and rival browsers when it comes down to leveraging the power of the GPU in order to render content.
Internet Explorer 9 is a fully-hardware accelerated browser, while the latest Builds of Chrome 7.0 and Firefox 4.0 are only partially accelerated.
Watch the video below, but also make sure to download IE9 PP6 as well as IE9 Beta in order to try the IE Test Drive demos for yourself.
“Microsoft has been really deliberate in their releases of IE9 to date, and this milestone is no different! I’m sure you aren’t surprised that we’re still collecting feedback on IE9 Beta and the next release will be driven by the quality of the product,” a Microsoft spokeswoman told me.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Build 9.0.7930.16406 is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 6 (PP6) is available for download here.
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