Thursday morning saw Microsoft release the beta of IE9.  It’s the latest version of their popular web browser.  It’s a surprisingly competitive market, for a product that’s essentially free, and Microsoft has been under considerable pressure from competitors like Google and Firefox. 

For sometime, the geeks have regarded Internet Explorer as inferior, but of course it comes with the PCs, and it is the main browser that most of our clients use, so it’s pretty important to us! 

Certainly with IE9, those geeks will need to revisit their opinions.  It might be trendy to hate the big guy who these days Microsoft (and to a lesser but growing extent, Google as well).  But the reality is that there has been a real renaissance at Microsoft with Windows 7, Office 2010 and now Internet Explorer 9

So what’s cool about IE9?  Our testing shows that it’s faster, and more elegant.  You can grab a copy yourself and test it – just go to http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.

More Screen Space

I like the way the search bar and address bar have been combined.  Once you see it, it seems so incredibly obvious that you wonder why it’s taken so long for someone to do this!  The next change is that the screen seems bigger.  Unlike other products which have been growing ribbons and so forth, the IE designers have done all they can to reduce the amount of space the menus take, and maximise the viewing area for internet content.  With all the new mini-netbook PCs with smaller screens, the maximising available space is a key design requirement.

One of the less welcome changes is that the popup warning has moved from the top of the screen to the bottom, where it is less noticeable.  Also, a lot of the options I’m used to using have vanished in quest for screen space.  But you can put these back, and I’ve done exactly that, making it familiar again.

Faster

The big deal with IE9 though is speed.  It’s a lot faster than previous versions.  The test drive site above is loaded with examples to highlight this, but it’s immediately noticeable.  What they’ve done is use the graphics processor in the PC, in much the same way that computer games work.  And it makes a huge difference!

Aero

The appearance of IE9 is also cleaner.  There are some features with the tabs, for example you can now drag them off to make separate windows if you want, or to ‘dock’ them if you’re using Windows 7.  You can also drag IE windows to the task bar, and this does more than simply make it a shortcut – for some sites, like Facebook, the right-click menu also includes common FB functions as we’ve highlighted below

Beta

This is only a beta – it’s not a final version, but like Windows7 and Office2010, the beta of Internet Explorer is a compelling download.