Internet Explorer (IE) 9 Beta Download And Review

Ever since Firefox has become a de facto browser and Chrome’s popularity increased every day, Internet Explorer 8 has fallen behind in usage. IE 9, the next version which promises a more beautiful web with next gen browsing experience, has been in the making for quite a while. The time has come for Microsoft to prove that they can make a good browser. Internet Explorer 9 Beta is now available for download for Windows 7 and Vista.

IE 9 And Windows XP

Unfortunately Windows XP users are left out of IE 9. This is because IE 9 depends on hardware acceleration with Direct2D and DirectWrite DirectX APIs, which are not supported on Windows XP. If you try to install IE 9 on Windows XP, you will get a message saying

Since you’re running Windows XP, you won’t be able to install Internet Explorer 9 unless you upgrade to a more recent version of Windows.

By the way hardware acceleration has recently become the default option in Firefox 4.

What’s New In IE 9

It depends on your current browser, really. If you are using Firefox or Chrome, then you will not find anything new with features such as Tear Off Tabs, Download Manager with Pause and Restart functions, a new Tab page showing your most often visited tabs, or the smart address bar which also plays the role of the search bar.

Of course all these features will be new to you if you were currently on IE 8 or an earlier version.

What’s Really New In IE 9

Now coming to those really exciting features of IE 9, first of all it’s the beautiful and compact design which shows only the most frequently used functionality. The address bar and the search bar are now integrated into one single bar saving a lot of space.

Compact And Sleek Design

As you can see in the screenshot below, you can drag and resize the address bar. There is no separate toolbar, but you can now find the Home, Favorites, and Tools icons in the right most corner.

Smart Address Cum Search Bar

The address bar of Internet Explorer is definitely smarter than it’s competitors. Again compactness plays a major role in it’s design. Once you start typing, you can see matching URLs from History, Favorites and even Search Suggestions. You need to first ‘Turn on Search Suggestions’ for your search provider.

The best thing is that you have more than one search providers installed in IE 9, you can choose between them by simply clicking on the icon. You can see that Google and Bing are the two available search providers in our browser (screenshot below), with Google being the default search provider. You can add a new search provider by clicking Add. This will take you to the Add-ons manager, where you can manage all your add-ons including search providers.

Windows 7 Integration With Taskbar Pinning, Jump lists

Microsoft has brought some innovative features in Windows 7, including jump lists and Pin to Taskbar. Giving a seamless integration with Windows 7, Microsoft has introduced Pinned shortcuts to Taskbar and Jump lists to Internet Explorer 9. Yes, you can now pin your favorite website to Windows 7 Superbar by dragging the tab or the site’s icon from the address bar.

Microsoft’s BeautyOfTheWeb website is designed to take full advantage of IE 9. In the screenshot below you can see BeautyOfTheWeb pinned to the taskbar, giving quick access (jump lists) to it’s different pages such as Product Guide, Highlights, and so on.

By the way, you should visit BeautyOfTheWeb in IE 9 to experience al it’s new features to the fullest extent. Firefox and Chrome are equally good in rendering this site.

Is this a new beginning for iPhone like web apps for IE 9? We will have to wait and see if IE 9 does kick off a whole new range of web applications.

Other Features

IE 9 features an Add-On Performance Advisor, one that tells you if your newly added extension is really worth having. By knowing which add-ons are slowing down your browser performance, you can disable them and find some other alternative.

The bottom notification bar is less intrusive than the top ones we see in all browsers, giving you status information, suggestions.

The new tab page which shows your most often visited sites has a color coded frequency bar for each site displaying your indulgence.

IE 9 supports HTML 5 and CSS3 the next generation web standards.

Performance

Now we know every one is curious about this one thing. IE 8 was super slow not just in opening websites, but also in opening up a new tab for browsing. We were tired of cursing it every time we had to open a IE only supported website.

IE 9 thankfully does not make you wait when you open a new tab. When it comes to browsing speed though it’s a bit tricky to measure IE 9′s performance. For one thing, IE 9 does not give you feedback (website loading progress bar) in the status bar. Also the feedback animation in the tabs is stopped much earlier before the whole website is rendered. In IE 8 you could see the status messages for all the downloaded components of a web page.

So the website seemingly loads faster in IE 9. Given the number of websites which are not optimized for IE 9, it’s difficult to measure it’s performance. Only a well planned and executed performance benchmark test can tell if IE 9 has any improvements in page load times.

Our Simple Test

We tested one of our image heavy pages 20 Best Themes For Windows XP and were indeed impressed with how fast this page loaded compared to Firefox or Chrome.

Conclusion

IE 9 will make you forget Microsoft’s debacles in designing browsers. It’s a state of the art browser with support for many emerging web standards, and is definitely going to be a strong competitor to Firefox or Chrome.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try it out yourself. Let us know in the comments what you think about Internet Explorer 9.

Download Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Works With Windows 7, Vista. Available for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.