Microsoft today unveiled a public sneak preview of its newest browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) which is aimed at Web developers.

At its Mix 2010 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers a first look at its new web browser.

The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is a prototype that's designed to show off the company's effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases, said Dean Hachamovich, the browser team's general manager, in a statement issued today before he took the stage at MIX10, Microsoft's Web developer conference, to publicly launch IE9.

The new Internet Explorer 9 browser platform will support a number of new standards, such as some parts of the HTML 5 spec and the SVG, or scalable vector graphics, standard, both overseen by the W3C organization, to which Microsoft contributes test code and other resources.

IE 9 Platform Preview is not yet a finished product, Microsoft acknowledged.

While it loads and renders Web pages using the Internet Explorer 9 platform, it is not designed to be a complete Web browser, Microsoft said in a fact sheet that accompanied the preview's announcement. This build is simply a first look at the work Microsoft has done so far and is ready to share with its developer community, added Hachamovich.

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