Microsoft has released the 7th Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, which mainly features enhancements to Chakra, IE9′s JavaScript engine. The IE9 Platform Preview 7 can be downloaded on the IE Test Drive website.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been tuning the JavaScript engine for more of the patterns we’ve found in real world sites. Based on the progress since the last platform preview, we’re releasing an updated platform preview build today so developers can try it out and provide feedback about the changes.

Microsoft released the very first Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 8 months ago, and they have made significant strides at each platform preview release. With the latest platform preview, IE9 beats out all the competition in the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests, including Google Chrome v8. Since the initial release of the platform preview, performance has increased 350%.

There isn’t much more to say, but if you want more in depth information, check out the post on the IEBlog.

Microsoft had their annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) on July 29, at that meeting, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner announced the public beta date for Internet Explorer 9. Originally Microsoft planned to have a public beta of Internet Explorer 9 ready for August, however, it was pushed to September, and Neowin suspects that it will come out September 2^nd.

According to Neowin, an Internet Explorer 9 build reveals that the public beta could feature a download manager and greater security control over add-ons. Neowin says they can confirm the leaked screenshots are real, but I myself am somewhat skeptical.

Fishy Acid3 test in screenshot

If you take a gander at the screenshot of the supposed leaked build of Internet Explorer 9 which is showing off the results of the Acid3 test, it shows a result of 53 out of 100, when the latest build of the the IE9 platform preview has a result of 83 out of 100. Also from reading the translated article, they say there is little performance improvement from Internet Explorer 8 to Internet Explorer 9, and we all know that is not true. As this blog post on the IEBlog shows, IE9 platform preview #3 is about 8 times faster than IE8.

The leaked build that Cnbeta supposedly has must be pretty old. Even older than the first IE9 platform preview, since the first preview scored 55 out of 100, 2 higher than the leaked build.

So could this leaked build be real? Yeah, sure, why not. Neowin says they can confirm that those screenshots are real, but whoever confirmed that for them never said how old the leaked IE9 build was.

It’s been about six months since the Chromium Security Reward program was launched, and Google has increased the maximum reward from $1,337 to $3,133.70. Google says the maximum amount is most likely to be rewarded to SecSeverity-Critical reports. The base reward for less severe issues remains at $500, however, the amount could increase if the report is high quality (careful test cases, accurate analysis of the root cause and productive discussion in helping to fix the issue).

It is more than likely this is in response to Mozilla increasing their reward from $500 to $3,000. However, Google claims the reward was increased since finding such a severe security flaw would be much harder due to Google Chrome’s sandbox.

Looks like Google is trying hard to be 1337 in their reward amount, though someone made a remark in the comments, saying “The 1337 schtick jumped the shark in 2000.”