In his MIX06 keynote, Bill Gates promises to update IE as often as every nine to 12 months to keep pace with quickly evolving Web technologies and programming tools.

Software programs and the Web are converging quickly, and Microsoft needs to release Web browsing technology and other products faster to keep up with the changes, chairman Bill Gates said Monday.

Speaking at Microsoft's MIX06 conference in Las Vegas for Web developers, Gates said Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 7 Web browser, expected later this year, is long overdue, and the company plans more frequent browser updates in the future. Microsoft released a refreshed version of its "beta 2 preview" of Internet Explorer 7 on Monday. The company also put in place a new license that will let developers using a test version of a Microsoft programming tool for Ajax apps to launch production Web sites with code generated by the software.

As technologies and programming tools for the Web change rapidly to allow software that spans a PC's hard drive and the Internet, Microsoft has been too slow to update its Web browser, said Gates. While Microsoft was busy assembling a platform of technologies for programming online apps, its browser had lost market share to the open-source Firefox software and Apple Computer's browser in the years since an IE upgrade. "In a sense, we're doing a mea culpa and saying we waited too long to do a new browser release," said Gates. Microsoft plans to release updates to IE more frequently, perhaps as often as every 9 months to a year. "IE7 is not the end of the line," he said.

According to Gates, Web sites are becoming like components in traditional software programs that can be called with APIs and run akin to subroutines. "That's a powerful idea whose time has come," Gates said. "This is a new generation of software."

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