Over the years, Microsoft has seen their market share in the area of Internet browsers slowly dwindle as Internet users move to other browsers that perhaps offer better features and reliability. Mozilla Firefox is a great example of a web browser that has a strong following, especially with its plugins, a feature that expands its functionality.

Recently, Microsoft has confirmed that their new browser, Internet Explorer 9 will not support Windows XP. This is a bit of a disappointment as the lifecycle for the XP operating system indicates that the retirement date is not until 2014 and with browsers being such an integral tool, you would hope that they would include backwards compatibility.

However this is not the case and one has to wonder if this will continue to push consumers to upgrade to Windows 7, their newest OS. It’s believed that with time, the latest hard drive technology will also push users into having to purchase Windows 7.

Out of the box, IE9 will come with HTML5 support and will also support 2D graphics acceleration, h.264 video playback, CSS3, SVG graphics. There will also be a new javascript engine.

Internet Explorer 9 is still a bit away before an official public release, but those that would like to try out an advance copy are able to download a test build of IE9. As it is still a test build, there may still be some bugs and so there may be some value in installing it in a virtual OS that can be removed once your testing is completed.

Via: Geeky Gadgets, Gadgetsteria, DVICE