A nasty rumor in the wild has come to end since PDC 09, when Microsoft revealed schedule of IE9 beta for the first time. Today Microsoft has announced that the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 has been scheduled to release on September 15th.

At Mix10, first Platform Preview of IE9 was made available for developers to test their websites capabilities to new web standards. After that 3 more PP releases were delivered which showed significant changes and performance improvements release by release; that put the solid foundation of IE beta and shows the hard work done by IE Team.

If you are interested in checking out the new Web platform capabilities of Internet Explorer 9. You can download the Internet Explorer Platform Preview 4, release last week.

James Pratt, Exploring IE says
Starting today, a select group of VIP web developers, designers, bloggers and press begin receiving their invitations to an event we’re holding in San Francisco on September 15th to celebrate the Beauty of the Web and to mark the launch of the IE9 Beta.

Reception for IE9 has been very positive since MIX with over 2.5 million downloads of the platform previews. The most recent platform preview our 4th was released last week.

Microsoft already unveiled that:

IE9 uses your whole PC to unlock the next class of experiences for the web. It is one of the fastest browsers today and the new JavaScript engine codenamed Chakra translates into an even faster IE 9.

IE9 introduces GPU-powered Canvas & GPU-powered <audio> and <video>and moves the browser from running on a crowded, single CPU to the fast, spacious GPU. Besides the new developer tool enables to create rich, standards-compliant, interoperable Web applications while making it easy to test and debug their web sites. IE9 also includes expanded support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text, and a new JavaScript engine. Together these allow developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications that take advantage of modern PC hardware through a modern operating system.