The wait is over. The world’s most popular browser sprouts it’s wing again with Internet Explorer 9. The beta is release and I had quickly went through the features.
The Installation took around 35MB in size (English Windows 7-64 bit). The package contains both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Internet Explorer 9. The installation is hectically slow as usual and it’s required to restart the machine after installation
Once after you launch IE, you will notice that it’s so clean! Wait, even before that did you notice it’s too fast like google chrome to start up? The tabs and addressbar is aligned in the same raw which give more vertical pixels in your view area. Now almost all browsers marries Google Chrome Style Tabs and Window arrangements Including Mozilla Firefox 4.
You may noticed that rendering is faster than previous versions and text content is more readable and smooth. Thanks for Direct2D and DirectWire. The new Windows APIs are hardware accelerated and use your GPU to render the text and images.
Where’s your bookmark bar? Well it’s hidden under the star icon at right top side. Just pop it up. The browser has all it’s conventional menus and all you can control it as your old browser. Alt+F, Alt+T etc will popup the original menu of the IE.
Another cool thing about IE is pinning. I used to keep all my favorite apps in the Windows 7 taskbar for quick launch. This feature is similar to Google Chrome’s application short cut. Just click on the tab and drag to the taskbar. You’re done! The Application shortcut is created.
New IE is completely compatible with Windows 7 and effectively uses it’s aero peek feature for previewing tabs.
The notification became simple and effective. You can see the notifications with a minimal but effective UI at the bottom of page.
The java script performance has significantly improved from it’s predecessors. The new IE supports several HTML5 features. Direct2D rendering ensures the pages are rendered fast in high quality. If some websites are broken with the new rendering, it’s easy to switch back with compatibility icon displays in addressbar.
I run 64-bit version of Internet explorer. One of the nightmare of the 64 bit browsers under Windows is the flash player. So far Adobe did not support 64 bit browsers. Now the pre release version of flash player is available for download. This will meet our essential requirements to keep the flash content available in a 64 bit browser. Also you can simply run 32 bit version of the browser if required. Some of the plugins like Google Voice/Talk is not compatible with 64-bit browser.
Finally my website http://codereflect.com/ is not really rendering good in IE9 because I use Google’s open fonts.
