With the ever-increasing success of alternative web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft have been under increased pressure to release a good all-round web browser. Of course, Microsoft enjoyed a relative monopoly on the browser market before the Mozilla project was begun, but the company's failure to produce a fully standards-compliant browser meant that their market share soon curtailed. 

However, all of that looks set to change after it was announced at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting that IE9 Beta would be with the world by September 2010. There had been numerous leaks and speculation about its release, but until the meeting Microsoft had failed to issue any sort of formal information about the latest incarnation of Internet Explorer. 

This new release promises fully-compliant HTML 5, support for W3C standards including HTML5 audio and video tags, and canvas elements, as well as Web Open Font Format (WOFF). It seems Microsoft is finally looking forwards at accessibility. Microsoft released a quick demonstration video to get our technical juices flowing:

To demonstrate just some of the new features of IE9, Microsoft have put together a Test Drive site to showcase everything and anything IE9 can do. Of course, other than the full support for CSS3, HTML 5 and a number of other advanced technologies, IE9 promises to match or beat the speed of current thoroughbread browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.

jQuery

Among other promises surrounding the release of IE9, Microsoft has also promised that it will contribute to new features and enhancements to the jQuery JavaScript library. 

We shall see whether Microsoft live up to their promises, but here's hoping the new release will be a better all-round web browser than previous attempts at dominating the web browser market!