Internet Explorer 9 beta Tour

Sep 15, 2010Bill Rowley

With all the attention paid to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox in recent years, it's easy to forget that Internet Explorer is still the World's most widely used Web browser.

01

Meet the new beta for Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of Microsoft's browser, arrives in beta form Wednesday. Among its improvements, it has better support for HTML5 and other Web standards, taps the PC graphics chip for hardware acceleration, and includes a much faster JavaScript engine.Here's a look at some of what you'll find in the IE9 experience.

02

New look for a new browser war

IE9's new look cribs heavily from other browsers that have gone minimalist. The search bar has been removed, and the search features in the location bar are more robust than before. The Command bar is now hidden by default, and its options have been folded into the Tools menu. The Status bar is off by default, too.

There's also an updated New Tab landing page, one that favors favicons for easy identification over screenshots for your most frequently visited sites. It also has links to previous sessions, closed tabs, and InPrivate browsing.

03

More 'new tabs'

Mouse over one of your frequently visited sites to see a generalization, such as "most active", of how often you visit it. One problem with the new tab page is that Microsoft undersells it a bit. Using favicons instead of screenshots gives it a clean, unified look, but there's no easy option to make it your default start page; you have to manually type "about:Tabs" in as your home page.

04

Minimalist notifications, too

The interface isn't the only part of IE9 that's gone back to basics. Notifications, such as the session recovery warning shown here,

appear at the bottom of the browser window and won't "grab your focus" and prevent you from continuing to browse.

05

Perhaps too minimal?

Though there's no doubt that IE9 goes to great lengths to make the browser the stage and not the play, anyone who prefers to run more than a couple tabs at the same time will quickly see a problem in having tabs on the same level as the location bar: cramping.

06

Merged Tools menu

The merged Tools menu could have become a lengthy laundry list of options, but the new design is easy to use.

07

Midlevel options need work

On the other hand, midlevel options menus, such as tab management, are lengthy and could have better layouts.

08

Location bar becomes the OneBox

With the removal of the search box, IE9 elegantly folds its features into the location bar. You can navigate to a site, search for sites, or look at browsing history or favorites. You can also change search providers at the bottom, which is a slick merge of the old search bar functionality into the location bar. By default, the OneBox won't remember your keystrokes. If you let it, though, you'll get additional search suggestions.

09

Favorites and Home in new locations

The Favorites and Home buttons have been pushed to new locations on the right side of the interface, and Favorites has been redone in an attempt to make the feature more useful. The connections to Feeds and History are certainly worthwhile, though.

10

E9 knows if an add-on is bad or good

Following up on a report from earlier this year that toolbars and other add-ons were a major source of instability in Internet Explorer, IE9 keeps a stern eye on your add-ons and will warn you when one is unnecessarily slowing down your browser.

11

Pinned sites

Pinned sites is a new feature in IE9 that lets users pin Web sites to the Windows 7 desktop taskbar. The pinned site's favicon becomes its taskbar icon, and IE automatically re-skins itself based on the favicon's color scheme.

12

Pinned sites features

Developers who take advantage of the options available to them for Pinned sites can customize the Windows 7 jump list for their site when pinned, or add in special features, such as an unread count for Webmail or media player controls for streaming audio and video sites.

13

Pinned, but unbranded

This is what the Pinned sites feature looks like on a site that hasn't yet incorporated the feature.

14

Crash recovery

Tab process isolation is nothing new to IE, but IE9 makes a point of attempting to recover the tab that's crashed. (Of course, it's not always successful.)

The big question: Is the IE 9 Public Beta any good?