That Was Fast: Microsoft Offers Internet Explorer 10 Preview

launching its Internet Explorer 9 browser

The preview at Microsoft's MIX 11 conference in Las Vegas is indicative of how aggressively the company intends to speed up development of its browser product to compete against rival browser products such as Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox.

The preview of the IE10 engine and several new browser test drives came Tuesday during MIX 11 keynotes by Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, and Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform.

Microsoft isn't disclosing a lot of details about the IE10 release, although Hachamovitch's presentation put a great deal of emphasis on the native support for the HTML5 standard in both IE9 and IE10. And in a blog posting Hachamovitch said IE 10 "builds on full hardware acceleration and continues our focus on site-ready Web-standards."

Microsoft is making a Windows-only preview of IE10 available through a link on the blog site and the company is promising updates every 8 to 12 weeks.

Microsoft has touted the fact that 2.35 million copies of IE9 were download in the first 24 hours of its availability last month. But that was far less than the 7 million copies of Firefox 4 downloaded in the first 24 months of its availability last month.