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Last month PCWizKid did an overview of the IE9 Preview which since made available earlier this year there has been over 2.5 million downloads mostly by web developers around the world who used it for testing.  Today Microsoft officially releases to the public Internet Explorer 9 Beta.  The near final version of IE9 contains user interface improvements making things more streamlined however there are much more anticipated updates that bring this release upto par with today's Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari browsers.

Main Featured Updates:
- Supports hardware-accelerated graphics. Utilizing a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to render complex visuals and video
- Support for the latest web standards HTML5, CSS 3 and SVG 1.1
- Now has a native JavaScript engine codenamed "Chakra" which can delegate processing to a computer's central processing unit (CPU)

NOTE:
For those looking to download and install the IE9 Beta, the requirements are Windows 7 (all versions) or Windows Vista + SP2.  All other older versions of Windows are not supported.  To download it visit Microsoft's IE 9 site beautyoftheweb.com .

Internet Explorer 9 Beta Review

So what's PCWizKid's verdict on the IE9 Beta?  One big giant leap forward for Microsoft that has been a long time coming!  Surprisingly the benchmark results of the Beta are the same as in the preview which is a performance boost and a big difference from IE 8 to IE9,  its like night and day.  So do I recommend this slick, clean and safe (so far) web browser at this stage? Just for the performance increase alone I do.  Like with any Beta release there will be issues and patches will need to be done to fix bugs, however this is a major improvement.