What Internet Explorer 9 Beta Looks Like
Internet Explorer 9 - The latest version of Microsoft's browser is now in beta and everyone is free to try it out
At the beginning of August Microsoft announced that its Internet Explorer 9 browser was close to hitting the beta development phase. The Redmond-based company sent invitations to developers, designers and members of the press mentioning that the event will be all about celebrating the “Beauty of the Web”.
I’m one of those people who ignore Internet Explorer for the most part. I guess it’s because it’s the web browser that ships with Windows and has been around since forever, yet never quite managed to offer anything exciting. This is why I’ve always preferred Firefox and more recently Google’s Chrome.
I won’t only install a new browser as soon as I re-install the operating system, but I’ve downloaded it in nearly every work computer I’ve ever used (assuming Firefox wasn’t installed already). Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 is perhaps the first version of the browser that’s ever sounded interesting for me, mostly because I know it promised to bring increased speeds, a minimalistic new interface and a large set of new features. Luckily, the Beauty of the Web event was scheduled for today, September 15, so we finally got to see exactly how the web becomes more beautiful with the help of Microsoft’s latest web browser version. The beta for Internet Explorer 9 is finally available for download and you can find it here.
According to Microsoft, IE9 is actually a reinvention of the browser. I wouldn’t go so far as them simply because from many points of view the browser looks and acts like Chrome. Then again, it was a pretty natural way for this kind of software to evolve. Companies have finally discovered that the user is more interested in viewing the actual web pages, rather than a ton of toolbars, buttons and search bars.
From this point of view Internet Explorer 9 is great. It sports a pretty simple and clear user interface and the web page actually pops out now. The menu bar is not present anymore (fortunately) and for the most part you’ll only see the address bar and the navigation buttons. Refresh and stop are now part of the address bar, displayed at the end of it as default. The user can however choose to have them displayed at the start of the address bar. All of the toolbars can be displayed as well, but I can’t imagine who’d want to do that and go back to the day when browsers were half the screen and the web page was the other half. Before the address bar you’ll get to see back and forward which interestingly enough appear to change in color based on the page you’re currently viewing. Once you type something onto the address bar, you’ll also discover that it features both suggestions from Bing and pages from your history.
While the browser looks much, much better than it used to, I’ll have to admit that the most interesting part about it is the few new features that make the overall experience much better. Perhaps the most appreciated feature so far is the Pinned Sites one. This allows the user to separate certain sites of choice (basically the ones you use the most and want easy access to at all times) and pin them onto the Windows Taskbar. Users will be able to do this simply by dragging the site to the bar. For easier recognition, the favicon of the site will be displayed. Because they pretty much look like programs, some sites even offer that list of options that you normally get when you right click the icon.
One very annoying aspect about Internet Explorer was the lack of an actual download manager which was present since forever in Chrome, Firefox and possibly even Maxton (I’m not sure at this time but that’s what I remember). In IE9 you finally get the darn thing. You’ll get a list of stuff you’re downloading, the progress made, as well as the files you’ve previously downloaded. For users of other browsers this is certainly not a big improvement. For previous Internet Explorer users, it definitely is.
The other two features are again omnipresent in Firefox (at least the beta of 4.0) and Chrome. Tabs in IE9 will now snap out of place and just like in Chrome you’ll be able to shut down a certain tab if the opened page is causing problems and freezing. Back in the day when I was using Firefox this was actually a nightmare for me. Opening a single bad-behaving site would cause me to completely shut down my browser with 10+ tabs.
The address bar is also the search bar in Microsoft’s IE9. It comes with Bing as a default search engine, as expected, but Google, Wikipedia and many more can be added. Opening a new tab will lead you to a 5 by 5 square page (again like Chrome, displaying the most popular sites you’ve navigated to, as well as suggested sites from Bing). Other options on the page include: hide sites, inPrivate Browsing, reopen closed tabs and reopen last session, all of them obviously quite useful in certain situations.
OK so what about the speed Microsoft has been boasting ever since it announced that it was working on Internet Explorer 9? The browser comes with support for HTML 5 video, a new JavaScript engine codename Chakra and the most recent web technologies including CSS3 and SVG2. I haven’t personally done any speed tests of any kind so I can’t guarantee it, but for the time being it doesn’t seem that far off from Chrome to be honest. Mozilla’s Firefox is clearly the one that looses in this case, at least for me, because both the current version and the 4.0 beta have been working rather sluggish and tend to freeze or crash a lot more than I remembered.
What else should you know? That the new browser will work on Windows 7 and Vista but won’t run properly on Windows XP or Mac computers. Microsoft has made a point of showcasing multiple websites that were designed to take advantage of the new and improved technologies of IE9 among which Facebook and Twitter. Some say that those sites or pages will work sluggish on browsers older than IE9. Despite the fact that I believe IE9 to be a huge improvement over 8 and that it blends in quite well on Windows 7, I’m still rather reluctant to give Chrome up in favor of it. Nevertheless, do try it out and see how it feels. You might like it. And if you don’t, you can always come back to your current web browser, whichever that may be.
