Microsoft recently announced, and made fully available, the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. IE9 has recently come out of Beta testing, and Microsoft claims it has net a total of 25 million downloads.
Microsoft’s goal with the latest release of Internet Explorer is to simplify, and speed up web browsing experience with increased support for more modern web standards. IE9 includes native support for HTML5, CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and several other standards.
Internet Explorer 9 features integrated tracking protection and security protocols which include a fully featured advertisement blocking procedure with up to date and fully customizable lists. IE9 also features HTML5 location services content which, like a cell phone, locates geographically relevant results and displays them on a map, new icon pinning which creates a shortcut directly to your favorite sites available on the task bar, a fully combined search and an address bar rolled into one and extended page tabs. In addition, Internet Explorer 9 now displays all relevant notifications on the bottom of the screen including downloads and system information.
In a more interesting inclusion, Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 9 also includes full hardware acceleration support by default for all text, graphic and video content which will subsequently increase both loading and browsing speeds. This feature is not available in either the Firefox 4.0 or Chrome 8.0 latest builds.
Microsoft included support in the IE9 Beta for most of the aforementioned features but has continuously improved them through updates and patches, and now they are close to final form in the Release Candidate.
It will be interesting to see, over time, which browser reigns supreme although in the past Internet Explorer certainly dominated due to availability. It was a great browser and had its advantages but ended up being used most simply because it was readily accessible on all