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Internet Explorer 9 – Beauty of the Web IE 9 Beta Released!

Microsoft has launched an upgraded version of the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). Currently at its beta stage, the new IE 9 has some impressive new features. With its launch, IE9 has gotten fast, becoming the second only browser, along with Firefox 4 beta to offer full hardware acceleration. The hardware acceleration currently implemented in Firefox and IE betas allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU), freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster.

While JavaScript is the very essence of the Web, IE 9′s new Chakra engine combined with the GPU acceleration gives the browser some serious rocket fuel. The new Add-On Performance Advisor removes the IE8 feature of exposing add-on load time and warns you if a particular add-on is slowing down your browsing session by more than 0.2 second. You can adjust that time to one of several presets from the same menu that you can disable an add-on.

In IE9, the tabs are located on the same row as the location bar, while the interface follows the basic IE standards with notifications appearing at the bottom of the browser window. The stop and refresh buttons on the other hand have been reduced to occupy as little space as possible while still being visible. Most items in the Command bar, such as print, page controls, and safety controls have been collapsed into the redesigned Tools menu. Only the Home button and the Favorites button retain their own top-level icons.

Beauty of the Web IE 9 Beta is Released

In addition, the new Tools menu is highly usable and depicts a clean and simple layout. You can also pin specific sites to your Windows 7 desktop taskbar. Click and hold on a tab, and drag it to the taskbar. IE9 takes Internet Explorer’s tab sandboxing and gives it a Chrome-styling so that you can drag a tab to create a new browser window. IE’s tabs allow the user to rip them off and immediately Aero Snap them to either side of the browser, useful for looking at two sites simultaneously.

Internet Explorer’s “OneBox,” as the company is calling it combines the search box with the location bar. You can navigate to a site, search for sites, and look at browsing history or favorites. You can also change search providers at the bottom, which is a slick merge of the old search bar functionality into the location bar. By default, the OneBox won’t remember your keystrokes.

The new Download Manager incorporates reputation-based security, to accelerate the pace at which you can install a new download if not speeding up the download itself. This means that well-known files, such as installers from trusted vendors, will cause fewer warnings if any to pop.

In my opinion, IE 9 continues Microsoft’s trend of pushing out betas that are highly usable. It’s worth downloading and checking it out- its speed, the design and standards compliance. Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the IE right.

*Require Windows 2007 OS to Install beta