"Friday Microsoft reportedly sent out media invites for an Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) event taking place in San Francisco on February 10, indicating that the Release Candidate (RC) of IE9 has been delayed from its previously targeted January 28 launch. Although unconfirmed, the company is expected to reveal IE9 RC during the press event, sporting built-in support for GPUs, HTML 5 and a number of new enhancements including location privacy.

"A bug in Microsoft's Internet Exploder 9 appears to have the advantage that it allows the browser to sale through the SunSpider JavaScript performance benchmark. The benchmark was devised by the developers of the WebKit browser engine, is used and quoted widely as a measure of browser scripting performance. IE 9 did extremely well in the test and this had people scratching their heads a bit. One of them Mozilla developer, Rob Sayre, made some minor changes to the test and saw Internet Explorer 9 slow down considerably.

Should anyone actually be interested in IE9, here is your chance to checkout the public beta.

Supposedly this is a screenshot of Internet Explorer 9, but there are no official comments to backup this claim just yet.

"Microsoft's gotten a little carried away with its Internet Explorer 9 excitement and posted an early screenshot of the browser up on its Russian site.." | more

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner revealed today at the company's annual financial analyst meeting that the first beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Web browser is planned for release in September. This is a little later than expected; leaked documents that emerged last month pointed at an August release date for the beta.

Microsoft has unveiled the first details of Internet Explorer 9, promising that it will close the performance gap on rival browsers.

Although Microsoft admitted it only started working on IE9 three weeks ago, the company still felt confident enough to share details of the next-generation browser with attendees at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The major newcomer is a revamped rendering engine that will tap the power of the PC's graphics card to accelerate text and graphics performance.