12 Things You Need to Know About Internet Explorer 9 Beta
9/17/2010 05:08:00 PM
kenmouse
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Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled Internet Explorer 9 Beta, a release that focused on paring down the browser experience so that users can quickly and easily access rich, HTML5-enabled sites. Here are the key take-aways to get you up to speed on Microsoft's new Web-browsing software. To try it out for yourself, head to beautyoftheweb.com.
1. It's Fast. Users who bailed on IE and switched to Google Chrome or Opera because they were so much faster than IE7 and 8 should know that the latest version of Internet Explorer can keep up. Not only is IE9's JavaScript performance nearly on par with its competitors, but its startup time is the best, and IE9's graphics hardware acceleration (which Firefox 4 beta 5 also offers) actually makes it faster for some Web content.
2. Forget XP. If you're running that 10-year-old operating system, you're out of luck when it comes to trying out IE9. Microsoft takes advantage of Windows 7 and Vista's newer DirectX capabilities for graphics hardware acceleration, and some Aero desktop features in its new browser.
3. It will be your only IE version. Unlike the early Platform Preview editions of IE9, the new beta replaces your existing Internet Explorer version, so you can't run it side by side with IE8.
4. The separate search box is gone. IE has gone the way of Chrome here: Microsoft's browser only offers One Box for both Web addresses and Web search. In a privacy-protecting move, unlike Chrome, you decide whether you want to turn search suggestions on before it's enabled. This way the One Box doesn't send your keystrokes to the search provider (by default, Bing, but you can choose any other) unless you give it permission.
5. You can pin sites like applications. This is only available in Windows 7, since that's the only OS version that lets you pin applications to the taskbar. In Vista, you can still add a site to the Start Menu to run it as though it were an app. When you launch a site from its Taskbar icon, the browser takes on the logo of the site (IE9 displays no logo of its own), and the home button disappears. Sites savvy about the pinning feature can add jumplist choices to the taskbar icon, for jumping directly to specific site tasks. For example, if you create a pinned button for Facebook, you can right click it to get directly to your News, Messages, Friends, and Events pages.
6. Notifications look different. Instead of the yellow bar across the top of the webpage, warning you about downloading or password remembering, the messages show up at the bottom of the screen. Microsoft studies told them that people's eyes naturally move down the page, so that's a better place for the notices.
7. There's a new download manager. It works well and adds security. When you accept a file for downloading, IE9's new download manager scans it for malware, and uses a new "reputation" technology that removes warnings for good downloads and makes warnings more severe for known badware. The window, accessible from the View downloads choice on the gear menu, also lets you pause and resume large file transfers and search previous downloads.
8. Link buttons are gone by default. In the name of trimming down the browser's top border, by default there's no Favorites button bar. You can re-enable them from a right-click menu at the top of the browser of from the star Favorites button. The Favorites/Feeds/History sidebar has moved to the right side of the browser window, but you can swap sides with its arrow button.
9. You can drag tabs out. This is another feature where IE has caught up with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. In IE9, you get the added benefit of being able to continue playing video or music as you drag a tab out, and tabs behave like other Windows 7 windows: If you drag all the way to the edge of your screen, the window will take up exactly half the display.
10. HTML5 sites work. Mostly. HTML is far from being a monolithic, binary situation. Every browser that supports it supports a different set of functions. But IE9 does a lot more than IE8, also supporting SVG and Canvas graphics, and some HTML5 video and audio.
11. There's a new new-tab page. More like Chrome's, which shows thumbnails of your most-frequently visited sites, IE9 also shows a grid of site icons with bars indicating how many times you've visited a site. You can remove entries, and still re-open closed tabs or start an InPrivate session.
12. It's not perfect. And it's not done. A few sites don't render correctly, though these are a small minority. The "Compatilbility Mode" button (a broken page) can fix some of these. Also, this is really still beta, so features can be added or removed before the actual final release. As the IE team lead, Dean Hachamovitch told me, "We still have a few more things up our sleeve."
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