Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner said that Microsoft will release the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September, which is one month later than previously leaked documents indicated. First screenshots reveal that there will be few surprises and IE9 may not look much different from IE8.

So far, IE9 previews have been limited to “platform previews” which are just that – previews that demonstrate the capability of the browser under the hood, but cannot be used as actual browsers as they lack key features, including the URL bar. Turner did not say whether there will be more platform previews until the release of the beta and whether we can expect more improvements.

If the performance of IE9 Beta will similar to the platform previews, then the software will show a substantial JavaScript performance improvement over IE8, but will remain slower than Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, IE9 comes with the advantage of GPU-supported graphics acceleration, which puts it out in front at complex graphics renderings based on HTML5.

Mozilla is expected to release its new JavaScript engine JaegerMonkey in September as well, which should provide a substantial speed increase over the current TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.6.x. Firefox 4 is also expected to include GPU-accelerated graphics. The benchmark in JavaScript performance remains Chrome, which is more than twice as fast than Firefox in its current developer versions 6.0.x.

A Chinese website has published leaked screenshots of IE9, which show few surprises. In fact, IE9 may look just like IE8.  However, it appears that IE9 will add a speed dial page with thumbnails for your favorite websites in a similar way as this feature is available in Opera and Chrome.

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