Just a few weeks for the Internet Explorer 9 to go public. As of now it is the test drive version that people are working with. Well it should give a fairly accurate representation of how the final product would be, right?!
First the bullet points
- IE9 obviously is the 9th iteration in Microsoft’s proprietary internet browser for the Windows platform.
- IE9 requires Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7…sorry XP users you are stuck with IE8
- IE9 supposedly is a huge step from Microsoft to move towards W3 web standards (more on that later)
- It is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Now to my opinion of IE9. IE9 sure looks like a complete overhaul of the series. (looks like Microsoft are doing a lot of overhauling these days). The browser window looks very different from any of the previous versions. The first striking aspect is the address box and the tab listing appear in one single line.
Oh wait its called the “One Box” not the address box any more because you can also simply search for keywords by typing there. The search provider will be retained from your previous version of internet explorer. However the “one Box” is kind of strange. if your keyword is quite short or related to a famous brand instead of showing search results IE9 directly takes you to a related site of that keyword. Sometimes it would just display the matching search terms (aka what I would’ve expected). Its difficult for me to predict what sort of an algorithm is being used here and it is difficult to assess whether it would make the user’s browsing experience simpler.
(On entering the search keyword microsoft-Chrome vs IE9)
IE9 would retain your previous IE’s configurations such as home pages , favorites and so on. But the “about:tabs” page has been modified to look similar to that of the WebKit browser’s. The page contains tiles of the pages you have visited recently along with information on how often you have visited it. But the tiles are a bit disappointing as it simply has a logo of the webpage in the corner instead of the webpage’s thumbnail.
Other significant UI changes are quite subtle. Maybe the large back button would be the only one that sticks out. Microsoft claims that IE9 is aimed at making the user concentrate on the web content rather than the browser itself. There are icons on the right of the browser to perform your regular tasks and configure certain settings.(not very different from Google Chrome or Safari).
The new download manager seems to more subdued as it is present meekly at the bottom of the screen.
More significantly there has been lots of effort put under the hood to make the browser compete with the others in terms of a web standards aspect. For eg., IE9 now supports HTML5 encoding natively without having to install Chrome frame. It also passes the Acid3 test with flying colors. It has a score of 95/100 which significantly is more than the Acid3 scores of IE6 IE& and IE8 put together. It has a faster Java script engine which means that web developers need not include specific IE optimization code into their websites. Almost all web pages are rendered almost perfectly. (Check out the sample provided at IE9’s webpage). The compatibility view option of IE8 seems to be bought under the hood in IE9. Users no longer have to think about any badly rendered sites due to incompatibility.IE9 also has better tab management-it is much easier and fun to re-arrange tabs. New tabs open pretty quickly and the eye-candy of breakaway tabs is also present(Chrome-like).
(IE9 supports HTML5 yay!)
IE9 also plays good with the other Microsoft software you might be running on your PC like Messenger, Outlook and so on(say for example it highlights recent activities of your Messenger friends on a particular site) . It also retains many of the important features of previous editions of IE like the In-Private browsing, pressing ALT to bring down “advanced” menus and so on.
(Windows 7 taskbar shortcut context menu)
It is quite obvious that IE9 is built with Windows 7 in mind. Like IE8 you can pin a shortcut of IE9 onto your Windows 7 task bar. Right clicking or swiping up on this shortcut would provide you with a Windows 7 context menu for IE9 like frequent sites,tasks and so on.There is this pretty neat option of pinning one of those thumbnails in the New Tab page onto your Start Menu. It seems to be a pretty good idea as users can quickly go to one of their favorite pages without opening up the browser. You could pin a torrent site to the start menu and immediately go to it with a single click.
And there comes a little snag in IE9. It could be because it is a pre-release version but I seem to have problems in downloading .torrent files. I didn’t have any such problem with IE8 or even other browsers like Firefox or Chrome. Also there is no status bar as such for the browser. Sometimes it is hard to notice whether a link I just clicked on is loading or not. Of course there is the occasional crash happening but this pre-release version seems to be more stable and usable than the previous full releases.
(WTH?)
This is probably the best version of IE yet and it seems that Microsoft has woken up to the browser battle after a long hibernation. Seems like they need Google or Apple to be at their heels all the time.’
Oh yeah the IE9 icon seems to have the lightest shade of blue yet. (Maybe because IE9 is the lightest IE out there??)
Download IE9 platform preview from here http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/downloads/Default.html
In case you don’t like it you can simply uninstall it from CONTROL PANEL and you would be reverted back to the default Internet Explorer for you OS.
arvindkrishnaa 
