Internet Explorer 9 Fast, Powerful, Intuitive

Start The Discussion | Jim Rapoza | March 26, 2011 06:00 AM

The browser wars are back and bigger than ever. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera are all providing innovative, fast, and streamlined experiences for surfing the Web. And now, with the release of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft joins in with arguably the best Web browser the company has ever released. With a revamped interface, improved security and privacy options, and much better performance, IE 9 compares well with competing browsers. Traditionally a laggard in performance tests, IE 9's new Web and JavaScript engines put it back among the pack in general performance tests and even slightly in the lead for JavaScript performance. IE 9 has also added many long missing features, such as a download manager and integrated search.

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Internet Explorer 9 Fast, Powerful, Intuitive

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Revamped Interface

One of the first things that users upgrading to Internet Explorer 9 will notice is its completely revamped interface. Borrowing liberally from the interface first introduced in Google Chrome, IE 9 now has a much cleaner and less cluttered look. Traditional menus have been replaced with a simple all-purpose Tool menu located in the upper right corner, though users preferring an old-school menu bar can turn it back on. However, having the address bar and the open tabbed windows on the same toolbar can lead to a tight squeeze when many tabbed windows are opened.

IE 9 has changed the window that displays when opening a new tab. Now, IE 9 displays a list of icons of Web sites that the user visits the most. This worked well, but when compared to browsers such as Chrome and Apple Safari, the ability to customize the new tab page in IE was very limited. A feature available only to Windows 7 users of IE 9 is Pinned Sites. Using this feature, I could add any site to the Windows 7 taskbar simply by clicking on its icon in the browser address bar and dragging it down to the taskbar. With this feature I could quickly launch a pinned site or Web application from the taskbar and also add the Web application to my Startup folder so it would launch when Windows launched. And, when a pinned site is launched, the browser window works almost like a separate application, down to its own unique icons and look based on the Web site's properties.

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