Internet Explorer 9 : New and Improved?

Microsoft's has released the new version of internet explorer with an intimidating slogan " Fast is now beautiful". Is it really the case? Let's find out.

First Impressions:
Following is a list of GUI changes that are noticed immediately  if you upgrade from IE8 to IE 9

• The RSS feeds now open at  the right  side of the page
• The lower status bar is gone, now the information bubble appears in case of some notification
• The home button is dragged to the far right , with Favourites button, and a tools button
• New tab opens with a selection of web page options , based on the frequency of usage, these can be customized
• Single address bar, also used for web search i.e google, bing, yahoo.
• New tabs open just right of the address bar, at the top of the page.

The New Home and Favourite links

The Fish Test ( Hardware acceleration)

Significant Features of the New IE 9 :

• Now you don't have to install a separate program to manage your downlaods as the IE9 comes with a built in download manager.
• Support for the new HTML5 and H.264 video support
• New chakra javascript engine
• Full hardware acceleration for text, graphics, and video. though it's a good thing but it does utilize your GPU , meaning increased power consumption. a concern for notebook users. I myselft noted that when I opened up the Fish browser test it put a load of about 35-40 % on the GPU raising its temperature to 68 degrees celcius from an idle state of 58 C.
• An interesting feature is pinning the sites in the taskbar, so a website practically opens like an app and has it's own private seesion, microsoft claims that it is safer to use for your most important and frequent websites and you can also force the https protocol in this way
• Combined address bar and search box. you can customize it to google, Bing or Yahoo based on your own preference.
• Browser tabs now open like the Opera browser, gives you a nice UI to open any recently visited website , these are customizable according to your own taste.
• Managing add-ons is easier with add-on performance advisor, it gives you an estimated load time of the specific add-on so you can pin point the culprit slowing down your browsing

The Tabs

Microsoft is rapidly losing it's market dominance in the browser wars , thanks to the Firefox, and is really pushing hard with all sorts of marketing with this version of IE, they've made up a Browser Test drive page where you can go and test your browser's capabilities.

I compared the google chrome head to head with  IE9 and must say that IE9 is faster, smoother in media enriched sites i.e full flash sites and sites that use complex script. but for the real world daily web-surfing and checking email I don't see any significant speed enhancement.

The most important aspect of web browsing is security, IE9 is certanly pimped up with security features, let's see how long it will survive before we see the hacks and security compromises so the next updates become available for download.
For people using IE8, if you haven't already upgraded then do it now, it is definitely recommended.

Internet Explorer 9 touted a first-day download count of 2.3 million. That's a strong number, although Firefox 3 scored more than 7 million downloads on its first day, around two and a half years ago. Watch out for Firefox 4 which is set to releaese on March 22nd.( beta version is already available for download)


Browser Test Drive Page

IE 9 Download Page

Supported OS :

• Windows 7 
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008