Microsoft unveiled its plans for Internet Explorer 9 mobile this week.

Internet Explorer 9 will be part of Windows Phone “Mango”, a big platform release due later this year. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Internet Explorer 9 mobile earlier this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Microsoft says Internet Explorer 9 will offer “a dramatically enhanced mobile Web browser experience.”

Joe Belfiore, who oversees Windows Phone Program Management, and is responsible for the design and software product definition of forthcoming generations of Windows phones demonstrated IE9 for Windows Phone. Belfiore showed off hardware acceleration of Internet Explorer 9 against Apple’s iPhone 4 (see video below).

Internet Explorer 9 mobile will be identical to Microsoft’s desktop browser according to the company and will allow Windows Phone to take advantage of the latest advances in web technologies, including HTML5. Microsoft is also likely to ship a Silverlight runtime inside of IE9 mobile but the company is refusing to comment until its MIX11 conference in April.

Microsoft previously advertised a job listing for a strong senior engineer that will be working on building the next generation IE platform for the next Windows Phone release. “This will include a major overhaul of standard support and new approaches to make significant advances in performance, power consumption and bandwidth utilization. Your responsibilities include making all these modern web platform features work on the Windows Phone platform,” wrote the software maker in a job listing.

If you missed Microsoft’s keynote earlier this week and would like to see Internet Explorer 9 mobile in action, check out the video below.