Much of the tech blogosphere is all a Twitter today over a discovery by Mary Jo Foley of a single image screenshot of Internet Explorer 9. This is the image making the rounds and subsequently taken down from the Russian Microsoft site where Mary Jo discovered it.

Now I am not suggesting that this isn’t what we will see come September 15th with Microsoft releases the beta of IE 9 but there are a couple of things about it that suggest to me that this isn’t the final version as many might think.

The first point to make about this image is that it could be from an older internal build being used at Microsoft. The reasoning behind this is, as Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear pointed out; with the help of some commenters at CNET, the Bing image is from December 2009. The key here is that Bing, as far as I know, does not re-use their background images on the Bing homepage. This means that this build of IE9 is at least 8 months old and as we all know – a lot can change in that time frame.

The other thing that makes me wonder about this being the final beta release version is that looking at the image I get a gut feeling of it being “uncompleted”. I can’t give any exact reasons why I feel this way but somehow I don’t think this is what the beta release will look like.

But of course we’ll all find out on September 15th.

Cross-posted at Winextra