This time next week, Microsoft will finally let us get our hands on the Internet Explorer 9 beta and, to try and build some excitement, the company has started an advertising campaign promoting the launch. At the same time, the new browser has gotten some free publicity as a video claiming to feature the new interface in action has leaked onto the web.
Feeling the love
The banner-ads (courtesy of istartedsomething) have apparently started appearing on a few major tech-related websites. Using a simple aesthetic and focusing on the ‘beauty of the web' that will be theme of next week's launch-event, the adverts show just how hard Microsoft is trying to gather support for IE9.
Frankly, this isn't a big surprise. With this new version, the company seems to have been working hard to make a competitive browser that can actually justify its market share. Throwing its (considerable) marketing muscle behind the project to help improve awareness just makes sense. Nonetheless, Microsoft is going to a lot of effort considering that this is just the launch of the beta, while the final code isn't expected until next year.
Unofficial beauty
From a slightly less-official source, iebest claims to have managed to get its hands on the installer for the upcoming beta. Though it declined to post the file, the good folks captured the browser in action and posted a video to YouTube.
While some are suggesting that it's a fake, the interface does look similar - though not identical - to the one that was grabbed from a Microsoft press-site a few weeks ago. However, the one minor let-down is that the browser is shown returning a score of 95/100 on the Acid3 test. While this beats the latest stable-release of Firefox - and is a huge improvement on the 20/100 achieved by IE8 - it can't quite match the perfect scores of Chrome, Safari and Opera.
