Aug 12, 2010 14:53 GMT  ·  By

Internet Explorer turns 15 in the month before Microsoft is scheduled to release the first Beta development milestone of Internet Explorer 9. The Redmond company first release its browser as a rival to Netscape back in 1995, bundling it with the Windows operating system, and offering it free of charge.

Since then, the success of IE has pretty much been tied to that of Windows, reaching a peak of over 95% early in the past decade.

However, as Mozilla and additional rivals have started releasing competitive browsers, IE’s market share dominance has dwindled.

IE’s share of the browser market is now just 60.74%, with Firefox owning 22.91%, Chrome 7.16%, Safari 5.09%, and Opera 2.45%, according to statistics released by Net Applications.

Still, in the past months IE has turned back the tide, and started gaining market share at the expense of Firefox and Chrome.

The software giant is currently hard at work building the next generation of IE. Early adopters have already been able to download four Platform Preview releases of Internet Explorer 9 since March 2010.

But Platform Preview 4 is the last developer build of IE9, as in September, Microsoft plans to release the first Beta of the product.

“At PDC09 in November last year, we made some commitments to the developer community about our future with Internet Explorer 9:

•Internet Explorer 9 would help enable the same markup to work across browsers

•Internet Explorer 9 would be all-round fast

•Through Windows and modern hardware, Internet Explorer 9 would unlock the next class of experiences for the web,” revealed Microsoft’s James Pratt.

“At MIX10 in March of this year, we released our first Internet Explorer Platform Preview and committed to updating it approximately every 8 weeks.

“Last week we released our 4th platform preview. Each release has supported more of the same markup that developers want to use to create the next generation of web experiences: HTML5, CSS3, ECMAScript 5 and more.

“Each release has been faster than the one before and as a result our score on popular micro-benchmarks like WebKit’s SunSpider have improved.

“With each release, through Windows and modern hardware we’ve showcased the possibilities for the next generation of web experiences through our Internet Explorer Test Drive site,” Pratt added.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 4 is available for download here.

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