Microsoft's preview release plans for IE9 are a good start, but I want more!

Few things get blog commenters as heated as software rivalries -- especially browser wars. With the release of the IE9 technical preview yesterday and the impressive demos at MIX10, Microsoft appears poised to make some serious strides toward being competitive once again. Hardware acceleration. HTML5 support. More standards-friendly. The times they are a-changin' for the once stodgy browser.

One other change is the increased availability of test builds. As Sebastian mentioned after the MIX210 keynote, Microsoft has committed to releasing new previews of IE9 every 8 weeks. That's great, but it probably won't amount to any more releases than we saw with IE8.

With Internet Explorer 8, development began in early 2006 and the first beta arrived about two years later. The final RTM of IE9 will likely arrive in 2011, so that should work out to five or six test builds (including betas and release candidates).

While that's nice, I'd like to see Microsoft get the community a little more involved. With their browser share on the slide, Microsoft can't afford for IE9 to be unimpressive. Community engagement was a huge part of the Windows 7 development process -- so why not take a similar approach to IE9? It works for rivals, and it could definitely work for Microsoft, too.
Frequent releases certainly make sense for open source products like Firefox and Chromium. If the source code is out there for everyone to see, you may as well offer nightly builds or automatic drops. But even Opera -- whose browser is closed source like Internet Explorer -- offers "snapshot" builds. Opera's Thomas Ford had this to say about their process:

"We are fortunate to have a large community of external testers. Their input is has, and always will be, vital to us. The testing process simply would not scale as gracefully without them.

We have seen so many benefits by keeping our community an active part of the development cycle."

Google feels pretty much the same way. On their original blog post explaining the differences in Chrome's channels (stable, beta, and dev) they offered the following:

"Because we don't have those big Dot-Oh release milestones on the calendar, we don't have long periods of Beta testing new features. Instead we use automatic update channels to release Google Chrome to a community of early adopters. The channels are essentially a never-ending Beta test and a continuous feedback loop that lets us rapidly develop new ideas into solid product features."

So what do you think? Is it time for Microsoft to get more test builds in the hands of early adopters? I'd certainly like to see them offer us a few more early looks -- and it could generate some much-needed excitement for IE9.

Tags: ie9, internet explorer, InternetExplorer, microsoft