As of now, Microsoft has released 4 ‘platform previews’ of the upcoming browser Internet Explorer 9 that showcased some of the highly anticipated features backed up by super efficient Javascript engine named ‘Chakra’ and latest standards like HTML5 and CSS3. But, until now, major UI elements in those builds were mostly missing. We can suspect Microsoft to unveil it on the day of the first Beta release which is in about 3 weeks from now.

However, Microsoft Russia ‘mistakenly’ posted the interface screens on their press website with some hazy information about the new browser. Although it was taken down immediately, many sites have managed to capture a glimpse of what’s coming:

The interface looks hugely ‘inspired’ by Google Chrome and Firefox 4 with major changes like the absence of the title-bar, integration of address-bar and search-bar, slimmer menu bars, etc. IE9 is also expected to include a feature that will recognize ‘protected’ sites as windows applications which can be moved to the task-bar and can be treated independently.

The performance of the ‘platform previews’ definitely impressed me and it’s only about time Microsoft makes a super ergonomic UI for the browser that holds the greatest share in the market. Is it the dawn of the yet another major browser war? What do you think about the new IE9 interface?