To view the full article in its entirety, please visit eWeek: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Due Sept. 15

"The fourth Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, shows the opportunity of fully hardware-accelerated HTML5," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, wrote in an Aug. 4 posting on the Windows Internet Explorer Weblog. "You can run new test drive samples that show modern SVG and native JavaScript integration in action. … With this installment, you will find more performance and more support in the same markup." That JavaScript integration, apparently, allows IE9 to achieve greater speeds than its predecessors.

The IE9 Platform Preview 4 can be downloaded from the Microsoft IE website here.

While rival browsers such as Firefox and Chrome offer strong challenges in the browser space, Internet Explorer has managed to make incremental gains with regard to overall users. Analytics firm Net Applications estimated Internet Explorer's share of the July browser market at 60.74 percent—a slight increase from June's 60.32 percent—followed by Firefox with 22.91 percent, Chrome with 7.16 percent, Safari with 5.09 percent and Opera with 2.45 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 has seen an increase in user adoption, while the respective market shares for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to decline. Microsoft executives keep suggesting that the latter versions' market erosion is a natural trend. Despite their encouraging users to migrate to the browser's newest versions, however, the company also intends to support the increasingly antiquated Internet Explorer 6 through April 2014.