14 DAY TRIAL // There should come as no surprise that the IE team continues to work on Internet Explorer 9, even though it doesn’t share with the public a flood of quasi-useless Builds. It appears that IE9 is now up to Build 9.0.8027.6000 (according to one source), a development release which supersedes Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 which was released recently, labeled 9.0.8023.6000.
And as users would expect, IE9 Build 9.0.8027.6000 doesn’t bring anything new to the table, being instead just a refined version of what early adopters can themselves download from Microsoft.
IE9 PP7 was released on November 17th, 2010, two months after the Beta Build was offered to testers, and exactly one year after Microsoft first demoed Internet Explorer 9 to the participants at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 and to the world.
Following the release of the Beta, the Redmond company continued harvesting feedback from developers and testers running IE9.
In this regard, the Platform Preview 7 and Platform Preview 6 release, both of which have been provided since the Beta went live, are in fact designed to integrate feedback from testers as well as soften all the rough edges of IE9’s core.
But Microsoft is in fact producing new Builds of IE9 on a daily basis. However, the IE team has chosen not to make available all the IE9 dailies and nightlies, but to share with testers only the milestones of the browser that manage to bring something new to the table, that have meaning.
And just looking at the release schedule for IE9 it’s clear that testers got consistent upgrades from one release to another, and there’s little chance of Microsoft changing this.
Following the release of IE9 PP7, Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President IE, noted that “looking ahead, we will continue to improve IE9’s performance.
“Making the full power of the PC available to websites is part of our focus on real-world sites and real-world performance. We’ll continue to work with the W3C and other browser developers to deliver on the goal of the same markup (the same HTML, CSS, and script) working across browsers.
“We’ll continue to take a holistic approach to the browser experience and platform and safety. We’ll also continue to release at a cadence that provides meaningful builds for the community to provide meaningful feedback.”
Also, I wouldn’t read too much into Build 9.0.8027.6000, or any other development milestone from Microsoft.
Fact is that IE9 is making its way to the Release Candidate (RC), and as the IE team indicated there might be some stops on the way, think PP6 and PP7, but RC is the destination.
And then RTW (release to web), I have a pretty good hunch when this deadline is set, but I’m just not ready to share it with the public just yet.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 7 (PP7) is available for download here.
