After the long period of wait with 4 releases of Platform Preview in between, Microsoft finally decided to open the door and unlock the beauty of the web by its first beta of IE 9. Unlike the last 2 releases on 7 and 8, this time, it looks promising. Even after 10 minutes of use, I am already impressed, in many aspects. It feels like Microsoft finally has caught up and back in the browser game.

The look

It’s streamlined, simplified in a way that users can truly enjoy the web surfing experience with more vertical space reserved. Comparing to the previous versions, it’s got address bar and tabs unified, even the search is integrated within the address bar together. It’s also got toolbars stripped down, with favorites bar and status bar not enabled by default. So users have the maximized space for web surf. It seems that IE 9 offers the most web surfing real estate among all the browsers.

However, the unified tab and address bar doesn’t help too much for those who often open many tabs at the same time. For those folks, me included, a separated tab and address bar might be more useful.

The speed

One of the most significant improvement in IE 9 is the performance. For all the benchmark comparison you can find on the internet, IE 9 is placed pretty much all at the top, or near to the top. The only area that IE 9 is slower than the latest Chrome and Opera is the JavaScript engine, which is still a few millisecond behind. But still, IE 9 beats both browsers in overall performance because of its very first and own full hardware acceleration.

Even on my 3-year-old laptop, the 50 fishes are still able to swimming in the ocean in 46 FPS speed, which is very smooth. You can test more things out over at IE9 Test Drive.

The tabs

Finally, you can tear off the tabs in this version of IE, which makes viewing two tabbed web pages side-by-side nicely by simply just snapping them to both sides of your screen. The New Tab Page is also redesigned and displays the sites you visit most often with color codes.

However, there is still one thing that is missing in tab. I still can’t close the tabs that are not active because there is no cross mark attached on the tabs that I can easily click. I’d like to see it’s available when the final version releases.

Also, the tab dragging isn’t as smooth as it does in Chrome or Firefox. Dragging a whole size of page surely is more difficult than dragging just a preview of the page.

The standard compliance

It’s the most stand compliance browser in IE history. Not only does it support industry web standards, but it also supports the new standard of CSS3 and HTML5. Even though it doesn’t render my site properly, I believe the effort that goes to make the browser more standard friendly is very noticeable.

The new features

There are many new features introduced in IE 9. And among these new nice features, the most interesting, maybe useful one is the pin-2-taskbar. Yes, with IE 9 in Windows 7, you can pin a webpage to the taskbar, simply by dragging the website icon in the address bar into the taskbar. And you can utilize the Jump list to quick access some of the features embedded in the pinned web page.

Lately, I found myself spending much more time on Chrome than IE and Firefox but now I will be switching my focus over to IE 9 a lot more. I will be exploring more features and will be covering them a lot in Windows7hacker in the past a couple of weeks.

Overall

I believe IE 9 will be the most significant upgrade since IE 6. While it still dominates in the corporate environment, the new release will be winning back a lot of consumers who have gone part ways with either Firefox or Chrome as well. It’s still in the early stage of beta testing so will have no doubts that the final release will be much better.

After using it for a while, I already found myself like it quite a bit. The layout is pretty much the same as the previous version, including the logo, but they added a few nice neat features on it that I found quite useful and user-friendly.

Address Bar

The suggested site has built in by default but you can turn it off if you don’t like it. It also grades out the sub-domains and folders in the url so the domain name stands a little bit out. Google Chrome already has this feature built in but FF hasn’t yet.

Add favorites right to the favorites toolbar

It’s quite useful having this little thing right next to the Favorites Star button so that I can add bookmarks right to the toolbar, instead having to go through a couple of more steps in the previous version.

Tabs are now grouped nicely in colors

That’s extremely helpful when you have a lot of tabs opened in your browser because then you can easily identify them where they come from and what they are related to. Nice thought and done, IE team.

The compatibility view helps

It helps reverse the browser back to the previous engine so 1) it helps when visiting the sites that aren’t compatible with the new version; and 2) it helps web developers to test their sites on two versions of browsers from one computer. It’s the button next to refresh button.

Accelerators do accelerate the browsing performance

When you select any text in the web page, a little blue arrow box pops up from which you can select numbers of choices to do a quick preview. It’s called accelerator, a little neat new feature added in this version that should be quite helpful in some cases.

Those are the quite obvious ones I discovered on this new version of IE. Digging deeper, the performance and the speed are quite impressively improved as well, compare to the previous version. In my own case, it’s definitely faster than Firefox, and pretty the same as Google Chrome, but that could be because I have quite a bit add-ons installed on Firefox that slows it down. It’s also quite industry standard compliant. Most of the sites I tested show the exact same result as from both Firefox and Google Chrome.

Overall, it’s a good and must-have upgrade. I will certainly use it more often than before. Nice work, IE team.