Discover Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Background

Microsoft on 15 Sept 2010 amidst a grand function with a band in attendance, unveiled the beta version of its latest web browser the ‘Internet Explorer 9’.The software giant had launched its first version of the browser the Internet Explorer 1 on August 16, 1995 and which came parcelled with Windows 95.

There are several non Microsoft web browsers in the market today viz. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera etc. It is an open secret that Internet Explorer (IE) has been over the years steadily loosing market to these browsers. IE's market share has declined from 79.16% in 2007 to its current share of 60.40%.

These other non Microsoft browsers on the other hand have improved their market share due to there improved features and ease of usability. For example Fire fox's share has grown to 22.93% and Google’s Chrome's more than doubled its market share in the past 12 months, to 7.52%. Microsoft is betting heavily on Internet Explorer 9 not only to maintain its majority share in the browser wars but increase it too.

New Features in IE 9

Improved Interface

The improved user interface (UI) is the first striking improvement in IE 9. The UI is simple, spacious, streamlined and uncluttered. It no longer has the embellishments like the menu bars, the search box.

Of course IE 9 has taken cues from its rivals. By default all but the most essential interface elements in the browser have been removed or hidden in IE9.

There’s no search box in the upper right corner. The command bar and Favourites bar are hidden. There’s no status bar along the bottom.

The Refresh and Stop buttons are of Gray colour. The three Gray buttons in the upper right corner are the Home page, Favourites, and Tools. When the mouse arrow is placed on any one, it becomes coloured and active.

Tabs for open pages are smaller, crisper in design, and located in a band to the right of the oneboxaddress bar.

The only element that i’s bigger and brighter than in IE9s predecessor is the blue Back button in the top left corner.

The new interface reminds you of the Chrome browser’s interface. As a result, the contents of the websites you’re viewing don’t have to jostle with logos, tool bars, menus, and buttons. Like Windows Explorer, the browser’s primary function now is to be a frame that hosts content silently.

OneBox

IE9 combines the address bar and search box into what Microsoft calls a Private OneBox; but it now has more capabilities.Bing, is IE 9’s default search engine and you can change that setting. If you turn on Bing suggestions the address bar sorts through your history, favourites, and live search results as you type.

Tab Management

Tab management in IE9 has a been further improved. It now has ability to tear off tabs and drag them into a new window or dock them to the side of the display. In IE 9, there's now the facility to just close one tab when a website starts to hang. Rather than shutting down the entire browser, from the task manager you can just kill one specific tab. The new tab page in IE 9 now also displays frequently visited sites along with a meter of how actively you visit them.

Pinned Short cuts

This isn't one of the most obvious new features of IE9. An average geek keeps the same web applications open all day. It could be Google,Gmail, Face book of Free Lance Jobs. When piled up together with a bunch of other sites it is easy to close them mistakenly.

IE9 allows you separate out those sites and pin them to the Windows Task bar. You drag a site to the bar, and when pinned it pulls the icon too so it looks like it's actually a separate program.This made it possible to quickly launch that site or web application from the task bar and also let me choose to add the web application to my Start-up folder so it would launch when Windows launched.

Some sites support jump lists, which is the list of short cuts that appears when you right click the icons. For instance, we pinned Twitter to our Task bar and could jump straight to our Direct Mentions, Mentions, etc. We're hoping more sites build in this functionality -- it's really a neat trick.

Download manager

Unbelievable it might be but now IE9 has its own real download manager. You can now review the progress of a current download and as well as what you've recently downloaded . Our program downloads appeared in the It also has a SmartScreen Filter, as it's been dubbed, that alerts you to security issues. Alerts appear within the browser window now rather than as a pop-up.

Notification Bar

Another useful feature that IE 9 is currently implementing is the notifications bar. The notifications bar now pops up in a bottom screen window that manages to be both informative. It is unobtrusive and provides information on things such as downloads, passwords and add-ons.

Add-On Performance Advisor

Yet another new feature is the Add-on Performance Advisor. The first time you boot up IE9 a small notification appears on the bottom asking if you'd like to "speed up browsing and start-up" by disabling them and makes suggestions on their impact on browser performance and gives the option to disable these add-ons in order to improve performance. It's a nifty trick; you don't have to go searching to disable them and it tells you how much time each of them adds to the browser start-up time.

Performance

IE 9 has closed the gap with its rival browsers and is now impressively ahead of them as far as comparative performance goes.IE 9 is fast now.

The single biggest performance boost in IE9 comes from its support for hardware acceleration. Because IE9 runs only on Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7, it can be tuned to offload some rendering tasks to modern graphics hardware, which often has more raw processing power than the rest of the PC.

The other new performance-enhancing component in IE9 is the new Chakra JavaScript engine, which uses multiple processor cores and has already been extensively benchmarked via the platform preview releases.

In previous IE versions, browser add-ons have been a frequent source of slowdowns. IE8 introduced an add-on manager that was effective but hard to find and too daunting for mere mortals. It’s still available in IE9, but it’s been supplemented with a cleaner tune-up kit. After you run IE9 for a while, you’ll see a notification along the bottom of the screen. If you choose to follow it, you’re taken to this simple list, where you can identify and if necessary disable a troublesome add-on.

Various technical tests have demonstrated that even the beta version of IE 9 is faster than Fire fox across the board and faster than Chrome on tasks where hardware acceleration is involved.

Support for the CSS3 and HTML5 Standards

It turns out that IE 9 is the most standards-compliant browser Microsoft has ever created, with nearly complete support for the CSS3 and HTML5 standards. What this means is that developers, Microsoft argues, will be able to write their mark-up for a web page and be confident that it will work the in IE9 just as well as in any other web browser.

Besides IE9 also has the same Compatibility View options as its previous versions. So it’s relatively easy to click the “broken page” icon in the address bar to fix problems if there are any. Designers can therefore code a page so that it always displays in IE7 compatibility mode.

Microsoft will fix a lot of bugs between now and the final release of IE9. So it will grow only better and better from the current beta versions.

So, Should I Install the IE9 Beta?

To the Microsoft loyalists specially those using Windows 7/Vista, I would say wait till the final release of IE 9, unless you are a sound geek; Indeed thereafter IE 9 promises you as good a internet experience as any other browser on the street- in fact with quite a few performance and usability improvements making it almost irresistible.

With support for built in future technologies IE 9 is a future hands down winner.

For the adventurous Internet Explorer 9 Beta is available in 29 languages from the Microsoft’s website as a free down load with instructions on how to install or uninstall it..