Microsoft has unveiled its “fastest, safest” Internet browser yet, claiming that Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) will redefine the way ordinary consumers interact with the web.

 

The beta version of IE9 became available (for Windows Vista and 7 only) for free public download last night at midnight.

 

“IE9 will change the web forever,” stated Microsoft South Africa’s Business Group Lead Colin Erasmus. “People think of the browser as a utilitarian tool and it’s evaluated by how it performs in speeds, feeds, and basic functionality. We want to change the terms of the debate. The future web needs more than just speed.”

 

According to Microsoft, IE9 is built around the basis that the browser is essential to the way people interact with their computers. “We know that most people spend more than half of their time on the PC in the browser. We want to define a new frame of reference for what a browser is, what it does and how success is measured. Our goal with IE9 is to deliver the best browsing experience out there,” said Erasmus. 

 

The company also makes some confident claim about its latest browser such as that it will make websites and web applications look and perform as though they were part of the computer, using the full capabilities of Windows and hardware so that websites are fast, responsive as well as interactive.

 

Redmond is aiming to re-establish itself in the browser market against popular rivals the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. Results from the company’s IE9 test site suggest that the new browser is notably faster than its rivals.

 

Erasmus said IE9 boasts support for industry standards such as extensive support for HTML5, SVG, CSS3 and COM, providing a new set of capabilities, enabling developers to write one set of markup that will work and look the same in all modern browsers.

 

IE9 also sports a new scripting engine, Chakra, which utilises multi-core CPUs in order to deliver eleven times the speed of IE8 and according to the software company making it faster than the latest shipping versions of Firefox and Safari in JavaScript performance.

 

“Internet Explorer 9 has really broken the glass ceiling for what we can build on the web. Developers have always had limitations because we’ve been trapped using just one core of a CPU,” said Erasmus.  “With IE9, we can design sites to use the power of the whole PC, just like we can when we’re building native Windows applications.”

 

IE9 is also the first browser to be fully hardware accelerated, employing the graphical power of the GPUs instead of the CPU.