Internet Explorer 9 beta set for September

During the annual Microsoft financial analyst meeting, Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner announced the beta for the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 would be publicly available this September. This actually puts the beta release a month later than first anticipated, as most prior speculation had it set for an August time frame.

The new version of their popular browser will focus on the HTML 5 standard and feature a new download manager, but further details are still being kept under tight wraps. When asked by the press for details beyond the beta release date, company spokesmen gave the standard, "We do not have any additional information at this time" response. So, for now we will just have to wait and see what trickles out over the next few months.

For those of you waiting for the final product, it is likely to not see the full light of day until sometime in 2011. However, Microsoft has released an open preview of the new browser, which can be downloaded here.

One of the more interesting tidbits regarding IE9 is how it lacks support for Windows XP. Even with the operating system being nine years old and having two successors, it still accounts for 68% of all Windows versions in use.