Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9)
On Monday 14, 2011 Microsoft launched IE 9 which attracted more than 2.35 million downloads in just 24 hours! This is the most modern browser and is expected to regain some of the lost market share by its main competitors, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome as you can see from the graph below:
Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/
The general feedback is quite positive after the beta and release candidates have drawn about 40 million downloads. Users are finding it fast and cool, a browser that will set the basis for future superior graphics and new functionality. You can download IE9 from here.
Internet Explorer 9 is available in 39 languages and is built from the ground up around modern web standards such as, HTML 5. The almost one year old beta went through a thorough build and test approach which included major hardware manufacturers. In fact, IE9 take full advantage of the modern PC technologies and the underlying Windows operating systems. It should look like a local application according to Microsoft.
IE 9 is Site centric that is, the browser remains in the background as much as possible as not to interfere with web applications. Actually, like Google’s Chrome there’s not a lot of browser on your screen if you haven’t overloaded it with many add-ons and toolbars. The browser frame uses a semi-transparent glass that have the look and feel of native applications.
Fast, clean, trusted and interoperable as described during the launch event, IE 9 has an industry leading protection and privacy mechanism. Performance is now based on HTML 5 which is known to perform better as it supports hardware accelerators; in fact, it is the first browser that takes full advantage of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). IE 9 outperforms other browsers when tested against some online games and it’s not only about graphics but video and audio too.
One of the new functions which hit the users’ attention is the Pinning feature where you can drag a site and drop it in taskbar. From there onwards it becomes like a local application with a jumplist to the site’s main functionality!
It works like this:
- Go to one of your favorite sites
- Drag the tab to your taskbar
- Right click the site icon on the taskbar and get a convenient menu (jumplist)
If for instance you prefer the browsers’ tabs on a separate row like in previous versions, then right click on a tab and select Show tabs on a separate row as shown below:
A previous version of Internet Explorer detects your system’s architecture automatically when downloading IE 9 from the hyperlink provided above, however, I came across a comment on a Microsoft forum that IE9 32 bit is recommended for both x86 and x64 architectures due to number of reasons. Like IE9 64 is resource hungry, slower & consumes more memory compared to 32bit. While, this may be true for previous versions of Internet Explorer, yet we have to see if IE 9 behaves likewise!
