Design and user interface:
"Unlocking the beauty of the Web." That's Microsoft's new tag line for Internet Explorer 9, and while it's marketing jargon at its best, we understand what Redmond's getting at. The company's finally realized that, you know, web surfers want to see more web -- i.e., less browser and ugly toolbars. And as you can tell from the screenshot above it's done quite a bit of cleaning up with a new minimalist design that truly focuses on the content. Actually, Microsoft claims with the new design more of a web page can be seen than in Firefox and we were able to confirm that – even if it's only by a few centimeters. It appears that Chrome actually allows you to see a bit more of a page, but honestly the difference in space really seems insignificant to us.
Most of the layout changes should be pretty obvious: the menu bar has been removed and the navigation controls / address bar are now at the forefront. We don't need to tell you that it looks a lot like Chrome – our guess is that Google's not exactly flattered by that since we're actually feeling the look of IE9 more than the cartoony aesthetic of Chrome, but we realize that's a personal preference. The compatibility view, refresh and stop buttons have been just latched on to the address bar and there are dedicated favorite and tools buttons on the far right side.
There are some other neat aesthetic additions worth mentioning. Our favorite is the changing color of the backwards and forwards button to match the rest of the site. For instance, when you launch Gmail, it takes a few seconds for the buttons to turn to red. With its glass frame and translucent windows, IE9 really matches the look of Windows 7, and we really see nothing wrong with that.
New features:
Microsoft may have tidied up a lot, but IE9 is actually stuffed up with new features. There are a number of new options that make surfing easier, and a few that help integrate browsing better into Windows 7 or, dare we say, Vista (the browser isn't going to be compatible with XP, as that guy's headed to the grave). Below are a few of the new features and our impressions of each of them.
Pinned Sites -- This isn't one of the most obvious new features of IE9, but it may just be our favorite. If you're anything like us, you keep the same web applications open all day – Gmail, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook – but mistakenly close them when they are lumped together with a bunch of other sites. IE9 lets you separate out those sites and lock them right to the Windows Taskbar. You drag a site to the bar, and when pinned it pulls the favicon so it looks like it's actually a separate program. Some sites will also support jump lists, which is the list of shortcuts that appears when you left right click the icons. For instance, we pinned Twitter to our Taskbar and could jump straight to our Direct Mentions, Mentions, etc. We're hoping more sites build in this functionality -- it's really a neat trick.
One Box – The address bar in IE9 still doubles as a search field, but it now has more capabilities. The default search engine is obviously Bing, but you can install Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook and lots of others through the Add-On page. We're actually becoming bigger fans of Bing by the day, and keeping it as the default search engine has its advantages: typing in terms like "Weather NYC" brought up the temperature and conditions inline, and typing a name like "Hillary Clinton" an image of our lovely Secretary of State. The bar also displays history results.
Tab functionality – Tabs aren't new to Internet Explorer, but Microsoft's added a few new tricks. They're really easy to snap out of place now, and even if you're doing something like playing a video in YouTube, detaching it doesn't lose your place as content is continuously rendered. Like Chrome, there's now the ability to just shut down one tab when a website starts to hang.Instead of having to shut down the entire browser, you can go into the task manager and just kill that particular tab. The new tab page shows frequently visited sites along with a meter of how actively you visit them. Shocker: Engadget is our most visited site.
Download manager – Can we get a loud "finally" on this one!? Yes, IE9 adds a real download manager that lets you see what you've recently downloaded as well as see the progress of a current download. Our program downloads appeared in the manager, but oddly a picture download didn't. It also has a SmartScreen Filter, as it's been dubbed, that alerts you to security issues. Alerts appear within the browser window now rather than as a pop-up.
Benchmarks:
Our impressions above are based on our last week with the browser, and are far more anecdotal than scientific. For the more concrete stuff, we've got benchmarks! Anyone can run these in-browser benchmarks and we'd love to hear some of your results, but we figured it was valuable to provide some of the numbers and test the top browsers on different types of laptops. As you'll see in the charts below, IE9 bested Firefox 3.6 in lots of the tests, but Chrome still won out in them all. We also threw Firefox 4 Beta 5 into the mold for a few of them.
A quick note on the test systems. We thought it best to try these out the browsers on a range of laptops (sorry, we didn't have any new desktops around!) The Alienware M11x we used packed an 1.06Hz Core i5 520UM processor, 2GB of RAM and 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M GPU. The ASUS Eee PC 1215N had an Intel Atom D525 CPU, 1GB of RAM and NVIDIA Ion graphics. The HP Envy 17 is obviously the powerhouse of the bunch -- it has a 1.6GHz Core i7 Q720 processor, 6GB of RAM, and 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics.
SunSpider JavaScript – This benchmark tests JavaScript. The lower the score the better.
source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/15/internet-explorer-9-beta-review/
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