Internet Explorer 9 review
Microsoft has launched a public beta of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 - we take a look and see how it's shaping up.
24 November 2010
It's easy to criticise Internet Explorer. The product has a long and somewhat bumpy history - and although it initially took the market lock, stock and barrel, it has since been increasingly marginalised by newcomers such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
Its flaws have been well-publicised: lacklustre performance, security issues, second-rate feature set - the list goes on. Yet, once Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7, it was clear that the company was serious again about the Web. This was rapidly followed by Internet Explorer 8 - again, a vast improvement that we felt dealt Microsoft back into the running.
But the browser still suffered from shortcomings. Performance lagged behind new browsers such as Chrome, especially when executing JavaScript - a major shortcoming when many of us now spend more time on JavaScript-intensive websites such as Facebook. It also still lags behind in terms of meeting Web standards such as CSS3 and HTML5 - something its competitors never cease crowing about.
Well, Microsoft is getting ready to roll out Internet Explorer 9 and has made available a public beta. We've been playing with it - and we really like what we see.
Loading up IE9, the first thing you notice is that there's less of it. Far less of it. Microsoft has clearly taken note of Google's Chrome, where the desire was to remove as much of the 'browser chrome' (menus, toolbars and so on) as possible. IE9 is sleek, stylish and minimalist. So minimalist that there are no menus whatsoever - just three icons (home, favourites and settings). We like it - you can get right on with the job of browsing the Web. It's a vast improvement (although personally we don't see why the 'back' button needs to be quite so huge).
Bing is the default search engine within IE9 - and it works so well that many people may stick with it. There's a single address bar/search bar (again, plagiarised from Chrome) and when you start to type it will auto-complete a list of suggestions for you.
If Bing can find images relevant to your search term, then it will include those in its suggestions. It's very neat and a quicker way to get at what you want than nipping off to the full websites for Bing or Google.
If there's a site that you visit often (such as ours!) then you can drag the tab for that site onto the taskbar, giving you one click access at anytime. It's this kind of feature that makes IE9 so useful. Lots of us visit the same sites often - or perhaps have one key site to which we need to continually return. This makes doing it as simple as launching a program.
The interface itself responds wonderfully with some well thought out little touches. For example, clicking on a site within your history (now kept with favourites) not only takes you to that site, but also closes the history sidebar automatically, saving you that extra click.
Performance is radically better. Indeed, we'd move it pretty much from last position to close to the top. IE9 is quick, whether it's rendering flat pages or JavaScript applications. The speed increase is noticeable and across the board. If you have the appropriate hardware, IE9 can be faster still, as it uses hardware acceleration features when they're available.
Finally, IE now has support for HTML5 and CSS3 - an area where it has really lagged behind other browsers, much to the annoyance of the world's website developers, who want to see full support for these standards across all browsers. Microsoft's support for both HTML5 and CSS3 has jumped from non-existent to very good indeed, although in some areas it still lags behind other browsers such as Safari. But it's a very good start indeed.
Although we've only scratched the surface of the changes in IE9, it's clear that this is a substantially better browser than all of its predecessors. IE6 may have secured the market, but it was technically poor. IE7 and IE8 have seen Microsoft working hard to catch up - and with IE9 they are close to getting there. This is a good, solid (if not yet perfect), fast, standards-compliant browser. If you use IE, upgrading is a no-brainer. If you don't, perhaps because you switched to another browser, now's the time to take a look again.
