But who knew? Mashable reports on the retirement of this iconic device as Tim presents IE6 with a lifetime achievement award. Go on, treat yourself to IE9.

It’s been a while, but it’s nice to see Tim Sneath’s blog spring back into life. “The Client Platform” is a big old topic to talk about but from the posts of the past couple of weeks it looks like HTML5 and IE9 are the current order of the day.

Take a look and there are some nice videos covering some of the recent IE9 Beauty of the Web launch. Like this one.

Making Of : Never Mind the Bullets from Steaw Web Design on Vimeo.

Oh yeah – Tim is also looking to hire someone to be an IE9/HTML5 Technical Evangelist. He says it’s the best job in the company, but I thought that was mine…

Did we launch something yesterday? Oh yes… that was it… the IE9 beta. It’s been an interesting time playing with the platform previews since IE9 was announced at MIX and it was great to get access to the browser chrome and development capabilities. You can grab it from here.

Of course the team have been busy looking at it from their point of view and if you haven’t seen this stuff then take a look.

• Martin talks about new features for developers on the all-new MSDN UK blog highlighting some of the work on the Gorillaz site which is well worth a look once you’ve downloaded the beta. He has a little more detail on his own blog.
• On the similarly new TechNet UK blog, Simon talks about things from an IT Pro perspective.
• Simon’s also built 9 1-minute videos (see what he did there?) which you can get to here. They’re all linked so you can bounce through them all over a coffee.
• The Ubelly back channel also cover the launch though they' are more interested in the HTML5 bits and you can see some of that discussion here.

I also really enjoyed Scott Hanselman’s developer-focussed post- definitely worth a read. If you really want to get right behind the detail of IE9 then as always I’d drink from the firehose that is the IE blog.

The Beauty of the Web launch site contains a load of great demos focussed on the various aspects of IE9 capabilities such as HTML5 and GPU-acceleration and also just some great examples of what the future holds for the web. I highly recommend a look at:

• The aforementioned Gorillaz site.
• The TopGear Cool Wall site.
• This BMW site.
• The Rough Guides site.

All of which are a bit of a showcase for HTML5 and CSS3. Enjoy and onward!