Software giant, Microsoft has said that it will launch the beta version of Internet Explorer 9 on September 15 in a San Francisco event.

The company has sent invitations for the event including an HTML5 invitation with an animated word game. The company said on Thursday that the users will be able to download code for IE9 on September 15.

The browser will officially be launched in the event called, "Beauty of the Web" and it will offer the interface which was not given out in preview editions of the browser released for testers. The company ahs released four "platform previews" since and last one coming last week when Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch expressed that it is the last before the beta release.

He pointed out that previews saw 2.5 million downloads and test site of demos received 20 million visits. The interface has been kept in close wraps by Microsoft. Experts are saying that the interface could feature tabs similar to that of Google Chrome or tool bar like in Office tools. While others predict an appearance similar to that of Zune/Windows Phone 7 "Metro".

The company has tried to build a browser which has improved and standards support. In order to improve speed, the browser uses graphics hardware acceleration through DirectX in Vista and Windows 7. The company integrated Chakra JavaScript engine directly into the browser code instead of separate script engine accessed via COM.  

IE9 will be the browser with support for most standards from the company. The browser will come with support for HTML5 including HTML5 video and audio elements, 2D graphics with Canvas element SVG, Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and CSS3.

Most experts expect that the IE9 will be released at the next Mix in March 2011 as the beta is being released in September and the IE8 was launched in March 2009.