I thought that hell would have frozen over long before I ever blog about a Microsoft product, let alone Internet Explorer, let alone looking forward to it, but here I am - blogging about Internet Explorer 9, the latest soon-to-be-released version of Internet Explorer.

Even though the much improved Internet Explorer 8 was only released over a year ago in March 2009, Microsoft are already hard at work (and not too far off releasing) version 9 of their controversial browser application. You can even download the latest preview of the browser from their test drive microsite.

It was also announced that the first official beta of Internet Explorer 9 will be launched on September 15th 2010, that's just 3 weeks away from today.

Having just switched to Google Chrome after years of being a Firefox fanboy, there is no worries of me jumping ship to Internet Explorer as my browser of choice anytime soon. However, the main reason for my excitement is the possibilities it opens up when developing websites.

Though we hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is probably one of the most influential browsers in terms of the technologies we decide to build our websites in. Due to the large market share, we have to make sure that what we build is compatible. This meant that using exciting new technologies such as CSS3, and HTML5 was not as possible as the more standards compliant and frequently updated browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

As of the fourth preview release, Internet Explorer has surprisingly good support for CSS3 selectors (43 out of 43) and properties, scores 93/100 on the Acid3 test – a much higher score than the 20/100 IE8 receives, a faster JavaScript engine and supports new HTML5 tags such as <video> and <header>.

With the end of Internet Explorer 6 coming more of a reality day by day, we are likely to see a big surge in people upgrading and therefore allow us to use these new technologies which the latest browsers are now supporting.

As an industry we are steaming forward into a more standardised playing field, meaning our web designers and developers are happier and the web will become a much more competitive and exciting venture.

Throwing themselves headlong into the community world, Microsoft have introduced the new ASP.NET Wiki

For those not familiar with the term Wiki; A Wiki is a site which has user-editable content right on the page.  Some work on an approval whereby the content is submitted to an administrator, who then approves or rejects the content.  some of the older ones i used to frequent were wide open but they soon got spammed to death so the freely-editable-content flavour are certainly on the decline.  some of the more famous Wiki sits include WikiPedia and openwiki 

So, here's the address of the asp.net one : http://wiki.asp.net/ . Seemed slow to respond for me but it's early days yet.  it's a subdomain of the fantastic and extremely busy asp.net forums so it's good they're keeping it all in the one place