Microsoft: IE9 beta coming September 15
Microsoft is inviting selected members of the press and “VIPs” to a September 15 event in San Francisco where it will launch the beta of Internet Explorer (IE) 9. — Company officials said in July that Microsoft would be launching the IE 9 beta in September …
Context & Ripple Effects
The September 15 beta date closes out an unusually open build-up for Microsoft: after a first look at Internet Explorer 8 back in 2008, the company ran IE9 through four successive Platform Previews for developers, ending with the final preview released August 4 and a stated September target for the beta. Inviting press and VIPs to a San Francisco launch event fits that pattern of staging IE9 as a comeback story rather than a quiet update.
The optics are complicated by timing: just two days earlier Microsoft was confirming Hotmail access problems and advising locked-out users to try Google's Chrome browser — a rival's product — to reach its own mail service. With Windows Phone 7 heading into a market entrenched by iOS and Android, and Microsoft Research prototyping a 'Menlo' mobile OS, IE9's standards push is one front in a broader campaign to show the company still competes where it once led.
First-order effects
- Developers who spent the summer testing the four IE9 Platform Previews get their first full browser build on September 15, moving from fragment testing to a complete product with UI.
- The San Francisco press event puts Microsoft's own messaging about IE9's performance and standards support directly in front of the journalists most likely to benchmark it against Chrome.
Second-order effects
- Google's Chrome and Mozilla's browser line face a Microsoft release cadence — four previews in roughly six months, then an open beta — designed to shrink the gap they have exploited with faster shipping cycles.
- Every Hotmail user steered toward Chrome during the outage is a data point rivals can cite; a credible IE9 beta is Microsoft's counterargument that switching browsers is no longer necessary.
Third-order effects
- If the rapid-preview-plus-beta rhythm holds beyond IE9, Internet Explorer shifts from a Windows-service pack cadence to a competitive browser release train, resetting expectations for how often Microsoft ships its most-used application.
- A standards-forward IE9 strengthens the case for building sites against emerging HTML5-era capabilities rather than legacy IE quirks — a structural change for enterprise web development that has long been anchored to old IE behavior.
The trend: Microsoft is retooling Internet Explorer from a slow, Windows-tied release into a rapidly iterated competitor against Google's Chrome, using public previews and betas to rebuild developer credibility.