Today (it's now 8AM PST (UTC-8)), the IE team announced the delivery date of the final version (RTW) of IE9: March 14, 2011. It's been a little over a year since IE9 Platform Preview 1 became available at MIX10. One year from announcement to RTW, with new platform previews every 6-7 weeks in between. This is amazing work that wouldn't have been possible without the incredibly useful, detailed, and numerous pieces of feedback from YOU, the community. THANK YOU. Big shout out to users Wheels of Flames and the dee!! 400 pieces of feedback submitted between the two of them! 17,000 total pieces of detailed customer feedback. 36 million downloads of IE9 Beta and RC. Very nice work!

Additionally, Ryan commits Dean to keynote at MIX11(are you coming? Get yourself to Vegas!) and Dean commits himself to appearing on C9 Live at MIX11 All around great news today!! Of course, there's the free and open(bar) IE team sponsored party at SXSW to celebrate the web.

Here's the link mentioned in the conversation related to supporting standards that are in unstable implementation states (that’s what http://html5labs.com is for, as Dean mentioned. This is a place to play with unstable standards implementations and provide feedback…): Web Sockets video: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7991991/

Not too long ago, a thread in the Coffeehouse was posted asking for your IE9 questions for Dean Hachamovitch, VP of Engineering for Internet Explorer. Thank you for asking such great questions, Niners! We didn't have time cover all of them, but we did manage to get through several of them (and there was some redundancy, too, so I took the liberty of choosing the questions. Also, I didn't ask any of the snarkier questions (though I probably could have, since Dean can handle it) and Dean did not want to see the questions before they were asked (which is commonplace among many executives). He's OldSchool9 that way and that's great!).

IE9 PP7 was released today and inside of it is one of the world's fastest JS engines (according to the SunSpider suite of JS performance tests, IE9 PP7 is faster than all other browsers out there...). Chakra, the IE9 JS engine, continues to evolve! Hats off to the Chakra team. Interestingly, Dean isn't overly excited about this news (though, obviously, he's thrilled) since JS execution speed is but one part of the overall performance story, which is actually divided into several pieces, not just two or three (see Jason Weber's quick chat on the overall performance characteristics that combine to form a user's experience of blazing fast web surfing, and read the IE team's blog post on the subject).

Here are the unedited questions Dean answered in this morning's conversation in the IE engineering building. Thank you, Dean, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to engage Niners' questions and concerns in an honest and open way. There is bonus footage at the end, too 

I recommend watching all of this as the flow is nice and the questions lead into one another nicely. Great job, Niners! This is a 51 minute interview, which is a long time in VP Time. Dean's a big fan of yours, Niners.

[Questions begin at 00:14:15, asked in the order listed below. Click on a question to go directly to the answer in the video. I do recommend that you watch/listen to the entire conversation as it flows naturally from question to question with many questions and answers nicely building on those that come before and after...]

CKurt:

How you do personally feel about the way the HTML 5 standard is progressing? It's talking such a long time to form, it's slowing down the evolution of the uniform internet and causing more and more fragmentation between browsers. Is it not?

Bas:

What if the HTML5 standard changes/is finalized within IE9's lifetime and before IE10 is out. What's going to happen? A patch?

JoshRoss:

Windows 7 had a tremendous amount of telemetry captured from the beta users and that information was immensely valuable. Was or is there any telemetry data collected from current or past testers?

Exoteric:

How do you measure Internet Explorer stability and when it's ready for RTM? Does the beta have any kind of telemetry for latencies: when the GUI freezes, when a page takes a long time to load, etc.
How many test cases do you have for IE9 at this point?

ZippyV:

Will we be able to write javascript or .net plugins for IE? We need an easier way to interact deeply with the browser but writing native plugins is too difficult and accelerators can't go deep enough.

Nazmus1992:

Are you anxious to see if Mozilla actually sends in a cake to the IE team when IE9 ships?

Do you plan to have IE score a 100 in the acid3 test?

Typhoon87:

Will platform previews continue after RTW release so we can see where you are heading for the next release? You seem to be about a 6 week or so window for the platform previews currently.

Any possibility of smaller update window between releases? eg will we be likely to see IE 9.1 or 9.5 that is smaller in scope but quicker to market?

US Archer:

What improvements have been made around touch support?  Is the UI fully baked in this Beta?

What is the state of webslices, something you still encourage site developers to implement?  For IE9, it would be really useful if we could preview these from the pinned site icon.

AndyC:

Does the IE team still feel like they're playing catch up or are they now at a point where future versions of IE might start to drive new ideas once again?

IE 8 Beta 2 is almost out of the oven. Given this, we of course want to find out all about it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Enter General Manager of Team Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and Program Manager Andy Zeigler. The topic of this particular conversation (other IE8 interviews are in the pipeline) is a complex and important one: User Privacy and what IE 8 will do to inform users and protect their personal information when surfing the Internet.

Dean and the IE team are very passionate (and very serious about) user privacy. It’s a hard problem for a browser to solve, but a browser is the first line of defense and can therefore supply users with helpful information regarding what websites are involved with a particular session. Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager of the new Privacy features in IE 8. Dean and Andy shed light onto exactly what's been done in the realm of Privacy in IE 8 Beta 2. Two core new Privacy mechanisms are present in IE 8: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking (with InPrivate Subscriptions, a feed-based blocking service). We of course address more than the What, however, as you'd expect from Channel 9. Is true privacy on the Internet even achievable (is anonymity possible given the architecture and implementation of the Internet)? What role can a web browser play in protecting a user's personally identifiable data?  

Tune in. This is a great conversation.