Microsoft have announced that there will be an Internet Explorer 9 (not a big surprise) and have given an early indication as to what it may include.
Headline features – faster with better standards support (in both cases playing catch up with Gecko, WebKit, Opera, etc.) and hardware accelerated graphics and font rendering which is something new and will improve the speed and quality of rendering across all sites not just ones that add new code.
No word yet on a release schedule, my personal guess would be late 2010 or early 2011 but as it’s Microsoft that could be well off.
One thing that concerns me is that the uptake by consumers may be slow. IE7 was the first release in five years and also shipped as part of Vista and IE8 ships as part of Windows 8 so users buying new machines got them automatically. With no new operating system the take up of IE9 may be slower.
Can you imagine the fuss if someone from Microsoft had walked on stage at a Press Conference and said “We’ve looked into it. Thought really hards about it. Brainstormed. The accountants got involved. So did the marketing people. We’ve all decided that there are some pretty good free web browsers out there so we’re going to stop making new versions of Internet Explorer and concentrate on stuff we make money from directly.”
I think you’re right though the biggest problem with IE continues to be the slow pace at which users upgrade. Although I think the worst offenders are in large institutions.