Microsoft said Wednesday that Internet Explorer 9 was finished and will be ready to download at March 15. It follows just a month after the release candidate and a year after the very earliest tech previews. The browser is significant both for Microsoft and the industry. It represents the company's first browser to honor web standards instead of focusing on proprietary code and, even in early tests, was competing in accuracy with rival browsers. Past versions have had many instances of proprietary rendering that either didn't render standards properly or forced web developers to include exceptions to account for IE users.
The browser also represents a major opportunity for Microsoft to freeze declines in market share. Despite a demographics revision that temporarily improved IE's market share, the browser has been sliding for the past few years as Firefox, Safari and eventually Chrome began adding many more features and better web rendering speed. IE9 has a much more competitive JavaScript engine with graphics-based hardware acceleration, HTML5 support and other improvements to catch up.
