Internet Explorer 9 has been officially released by Microsoft, promising faster, more visually compelling web experiences and applications with its HTML5 capability.

“We developed Internet Explorer 9 for people who love the web - it’s where they’re informed, entertained and where they socialise. For them, it’s about the sites they love and that really informed our development process,” said Melissa Dewick, consumer product marketing manager, at Microsoft Australia.

“Today, Internet Explorer 9 enables websites to look and perform as if they were native to your PC by unlocking the power and performance of the best PC hardware and Windows. Thanks to the advent of HTML5 and features such as Pinned Sites, websites can act more like applications within Windows 7.”

Microsoft has introduced Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9, which promises to put people in control of what data they are sharing as they move around the Web.

IE9 also includes a Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection.
Improved support for HTML5 and CSS3, as well as JavaScript performance 10x faster than IE8, win praise from ECM developer KnowlegeOne Corporation.

Chief Software Engineer Kevin Donahue is looking forward to IE9’s increased level of graphics and video support, as well as the ability to pin commonly-used web sites to the task bar in Windows 7.

“It means we can start planning to develop more sophisticated UIs in future releases now that the major browsers are providing support for HTML5 and CSS3.

“With the ability to create much richer user interfaces and the nice “pin to task bar” feature of Windows 7, you will probably see government and enterprise users move away from windows fat applications and start to implement more web based applications, especially if there is nothing to install.”

According to analysts Ovum, “Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) will excite web developers and ‘prosumers’ as they explore the new HTML5 capabilities of the Web’s most commonly used browser (Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 account for around 80% of the business browser market), but we consider it to be a non-event for the vast majority of corporate IT managers and their users.”

“This is largely because IE9 does not run on Windows XP – the operating system running on 67% of corporate desktops. Organisations with public-facing websites will probably try and encourage consumers to use the more capable, web standards compliant IE9 in order to make life easier for their web developers and to wow them with a richer experience, but non-technical users will probably wait until Microsoft pushes the browser out in a Windows service pack.”