Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta Ships Next Week

The launch of Internet Explorer 9 Beta is just around the corner, with the Beauty of the Web event scheduled for next week, on September 15th, 2010. Next Wednesday, with the availability of the IE9 Beta bits, Microsoft reaches an important milestone in its efforts to unlock the native web.

“Unlocking the native web” for the IE team is equivalent with narrowing the gap between the desktop and the Cloud, essentially making Internet-based applications look and feel like native Windows apps.

IE9 is Microsoft’s most standard compliant release of IE yet, but it brings so much more to the table, including a new JavaScript engine codenamed Chakra, and extremely powerful HMLT5 hardware acceleration for graphics, text and media content.

Early adopters and developers have so far been able to download and test no less than four Platform Preview Builds of IE9.

Although the various developer releases of IE9 were downloaded in excess of 2.5 million times, the browser will only be ready for the public as of the Beta phase, which is planned for arrival next week.

IE9 Beta will be a full browser, ready for widespread testing, even by end users, unlike the Platform Preview Builds which did not feature an Address Bar, or navigation elements such as Back and Forward buttons.

Undoubtedly, some of you have questions related to both Internet Explorer 9 Beta and the future evolution of the browser.

Next week I will be attending the Beauty of the Web IE9 Beta launch event in San Francisco. I expect to get some face time with members of the IE team, in addition to other participants.

So I thought I’d offer you the chance to send over your IE9-related questions to me, and I’ll make sure to pass them on to the people behind Internet Explorer 9.

You can leave a comment below, or use the email address at the bottom of this article. I can also be contacted on Twitter.