Microsoft has finally unveiled another major milestone to final release of Internet Explorer 9 by making IE9 Release Candidate download available for everybody. The "Release Candidate" build features a new ActiveX filtering system which allows users to “turn off ActiveX” for all sites and then re-enable it on site by site basis, on the UI part users can now have tabs on a separate line from address bar, apart from these changes many improvements were done in overall web-browser performance, standards & platform support, user experience and security as detailed next.

The IE9 Beta installer is now officially available for public download and can be grabbed from the direct download links provided below, the web-installer stub is just 2.37 MB in size which downloads the remaining setup files (roughly 24 mb on Windows 7 32bit) and surprisingly requires a system reboot to install (the only web-browser to do that).

First public beta of Windows Internet Explorer 9 is going to be released in 7 days from now on September, 15, but it seems the IE9 Beta Installer is now leaked outside Microsoft as a website claimed to have the setup also posting the video below demoing the release.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is showing some steady and impressive progress as the development cycle is inching towards a public beta release, Microsoft is emphasizing support for modern web on IE9 platform capable of delivering rich HTML5 experience that feel more like native applications than websites - supporting hardware-accelerated SVG, canvas, audio, video,and text, IE9 will be harnessing full potential of the PC to achieve best performance.

To further strengthen the ultimate goal of an fast, modern, web-browser IE9's fourth developer preview is now available for download with support for fully hardware-accelerated HTML5 and new test-drive demos showing modern SVG and native JavaScript integration in action.

The web-browser war is once again going to get interesting with Internet Explorer 9 Preview now available for public download promising impressive upcoming features, boasting 100% support for W3C Web Standards (see comparison table after the jump) IE9 will support hardware assisted page rendering, background compiled JavaScript and GPU-powered HTML5 graphics for superior performance.