At the Professional Developers Conference 2009 day two keynote, Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky showed off a very, very early version of Internet Explorer 9, the next major version of Microsoft's now-venerable web browser. This was an unexpected development, given that Internet Explorer 8 shipped earlier this year and was just included with Windows 7, which shipped last month. But Microsoft clearly wanted to demonstrate that it would continue advancing IE at a rapid pace, meeting criticisms of the current product and--the real surprise--delivering on some unexpected functionality.

What we don't know about IE 9 is a much broader discussion than that about what we do know. It's early yet, so that's OK, but I do want to set some expectations: The very early IE 9 preview build we saw this week at PDC did not contain any hint at all about the future user interface or other functional aspects of the browser. In fact, the build used in the keynote, and the one I saw separately in a meeting, lacked any kind of user interface at all. It's just a bare window frame that's designed to let the rendering engine do its thing and show off the few bits of functionality Microsoft is now publicly committing to.

"This is just a preview, an early look at where we are with IE 9 for developers," IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch told me during a briefing. "We're focusing on three very specific areas: Performance, interoperability standards, and hardware acceleration."

Anyone hoping that Microsoft would do something radical like adopt a competing web rendering engine (like WebKit) or even more radical, like dropping IE all together (and yes, those people are out there) will likely be confused by this early focus. And judging from what I've seen from people's reactions to the keynote demonstration online, there's further confusion about what was announced. I'd like to take this time to try and communicate what's really happening.

Read the entire article in SuperSite.