Mar 15, 2011 14:44 GMT  ·  By

Are you curious to find out how and why Microsoft developed this version of Internet Explorer? Then watch the video embedded below to find out. It features Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer, at the Internet Explorer 9 RTW launch event at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

As many of you already know, IE9 was released to web yesterday, March 14th, 2010 with Hachamovitch and additional speakers sharing the engineering back story of the latest iteration of Internet Explorer with the world.

“The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9,” Hachamovitch said. “Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9.

“Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites. In less than a year, Internet Explorer 9 went from early preview to final release with the help of hardware partners and the Web community.”

The software giant launched IE9 Platform Preview 1 in March 2010, with the last development milestone, the RC (Release Candidate) offered to testers in February 2011.

There was a single Beta of IE9, launched in September 2010, at which point, Microsoft was encouraging all users to download and test the release.

With over 40 million downloads while still in development, IE9 was responsible for Microsoft’ s largest Beta yet, at about twice the size of IE8.

But if you want the full story on IE9, you will need to watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article.

And by all means, don’t forget to download and try Internet Explorer 9, this release is bound to surprise you in more ways than one.

You will be able to do it, provided that you’re running Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7, not Windows XP SP3, there’s no support for pre-Vista SP2 platforms.

Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.

Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 is available for download here.

Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit edition is available for download here.

Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 64-bit edition, Windows 7 SP1 64-bit edition, Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 64-bit edition is available for download here.