Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 or IE9 (officially Windows Internet Explorer 9) is the ninth major version of the Internet Explorer web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 14, 2011, as the successor to Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 as a major out-of-band version that was not tied to the release schedule of any particular version of Windows, unlike previous versions. It is the first version of Internet Explorer not to be bundled with a Windows operating system, although some OEMs have installed it with Windows on their PCs. It was the last version to be called Windows Internet Explorer. The software was rebranded simply as Internet Explorer starting with the release of Internet Explorer 10.

Internet Explorer 9 supports ECMAScript 5 (ES5), several CSS 3 properties, and embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and has improved JavaScript performance. It was the last of the major web browsers to implement support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It also features hardware-accelerated graphics rendering using Direct2D, hardware-accelerated text rendering using DirectWrite, hardware-accelerated video rendering using Media Foundation, imaging support provided by Windows Imaging Component, and high fidelity printing powered by the XML Paper Specification (XPS) print pipeline. Internet Explorer 9 also supports the HTML media tags <video> and <audio> and the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).

As of 2013, Internet Explorer 9 is the last version to support Windows Vista SP2 – with its server counterpart Windows Server 2008 SP2 – and Windows 7 RTM – with its server counterpart Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM – as Internet Explorer 10 required Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.