Microsoft to Launch IE9 March 14

Microsoft has announced in a blog post that the successor to their much-maligned browser, Internet Explorer 8, is finally coming out to the general public. Whilst older versions of IE performed very poorly, had plenty of bugs and security flaws, and failed miserably at standards compliance, Microsoft claims that they have made big improvements in all three of those areas. In terms of performance, IE9 has already shown to be much, much improved over IE 8, with hardware acceleration bringing it into competition with some of the top speed contenders, just as it did with Mozilla's Firefox 4 Beta. However, as opposed to Mozilla's heavily delayed release schedule, Internet Explorer's final, polished form is now out, with Mozilla only just getting around to releasing the FF 4 RC. Will this new IE finally silence the naysayers?

Probably not. All told, IE9 still doesn't perform quite as well as FF4, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, and many will continue to criticize (perhaps rightly) the platform's lack of openness, preventing the kind of extension and bug-fixing ecosystem that Chrome and Firefox enjoy. As far as security, only time will tell how bulletproof Microsoft's new browser really is.