The final version of Internet Explorer 9 was released today to the general public after 6 months of beta testing by around 40 million users. The key point I will emphasise now is that any previous perception or opinion you have about Internet Explorer needs to be forgotten when looking at this new version of the browser. Thanks to competition from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and a rapidly declining usage share for Internet Explorer, the team at Microsoft who build the browser have had to refocus priorities and rewrite Internet Explorer to be standards compliant, fast, simple to use and secure, to compete with the new competition that has emerged since the last version they released, and they've actually done a very good job with this version. So Internet Explorer 9 is radically different to all the previous versions of Internet Explorer and that's what this review is going to focus on: What Microsoft got right in this version! You can download the final version of the browser from www.microsoft.com/ie BUT I will note here that (as with the beta version I reviewed back in September) this version of Internet Explorer will not work on Windows XP. It requires Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 to run and also note that there are a number of features that only work on Windows 7. So with that out of the way, let's have a look at Internet Explorer 9.
New Browser Features (For Windows Vista SP2 & Windows 7)
User Interface
One of the main goals that Microsoft had to achieve in Internet Explorer 9 was to simplify the user interface. Google Chrome has been gaining popularity for a number of reasons lately and one of the major ones was that it had a very simple user interface. A simple user interface in a browser is important, because it's not the browser that should be the focus on the user's attention, instead it's the content that the browser is displaying: the webpage! Internet Explorer 8 had a rather cluttered look to it with a title bar, address bar, search box, favourites button and tab bar and a command toolbar with various buttons on display and also possibly, a menu bar.
Internet Explorer 9 does away with a lot of that interface and instead has one row of buttons including Back & Forward buttons, a new all in one search and address box with Stop/Refresh buttons, tab bar and Home, Favourites and Tools buttons. The rest of the screen is used to display the content the user wants, the web page.
The new address/search box combines the two separate boxes in Internet Explorer 8 into one. If you type a web address into the box such as www.facebook.com it will take you to Facebook's website as expected, but if you type in Brisbane's Myer Centre it will instead search for that term using the default web browser on your system (most likely Bing, but you can change it to Google if you want).
The major key user interface change made to Internet Explorer 9 is the removal of pop up dialogs for things such as downloads, ActiveX control installation and security prompts. Internet Explorer 9 now places those type of prompts into notification boxes that appear at the bottom of the browser window, but they don't stop you from doing what you're doing, forcing you to read them immediately like they did previously.
Oh, one other thing that's been added to this version of Internet Explorer, long long after it should have been: A Download Manager! Internet Explorer 9 now comes with a download manager that can pause and resume downloads. It's about as simple as that!
There are a couple more user interface changes that have been made in this version, but they only apply to users of Windows 7, so I will address those later in this article.
Performance
This isn't something I can show you using screenshots, but it was still a major focus for the Internet Explorer team when they were building this version of the browser. Internet Explorer 8 was a fairly bloated browser to begin with, especially when lots of add-onsended up installing themselves, but it was also fairly slow at rendering at rendering web pages and executing Javascript and modern, light browsers like Google Chrome simply were miles ahead in the performance game. This has changed with Internet Explorer 9, they're about equal now and it's due to 2 major reasons. Firstly, Internet Explorer 9 is just a generally faster browser with quicker start times and a much faster page rendering and javascript execution engine. The second reason is that Internet Explorer 9 is the only web browser with FULL Hardware Acceleration. Internet Explorer 9 uses your graphics card's power to render web pages to save the CPU work. The other web browsers have quite good parial hardware acceleration, but Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser where it can be fully implimented, because Microsoft makes Windows and therefore has intimate knowledge of the APIs available (and are probably using techniques that nobody else is able to leverage anyway). So it can render web pages quite quickly and it keeps up with (and often outperforms) Google Chrome.
Standards Compliance
This was another major focus of Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer has managed to build up a very bad reputation of being a non standards compliant browser over many years and this is due to the monopoly they held for so long. The idea long ago was, if we create our own standards, then web sites will have to use those standards and we'll lock users into using Internet Explorer. Well times have changed and these days it just means that web pages often don't render correctly in Internet Explorer because it didn't follow correct web standards. Well this has changed in Internet Explorer 9 and it's now one of the best browsers in terms of standards compliance. The only issue really these days now are websites who've got code in their websites which detects IE and produce a seperate version of the site for them, which now doesn't render properly in Internet Explorer 9 because it's now following standards, but the website is showing a modified version of the page which is designed for older versions which didn't follow standards. This practise will hopefully start to disappear soon and once it does (or if sites are updated to detect IE9 and leave the page alone) then this browser should display pages just like Firefox and Chrome do.
Security, Safety & Privacy
The final key focus of Internet Explorer 9 was for it to be a secure, safe and private browser. The inclusion of 2 new features, plus the enhancement of previous security features means that Internet Explorer 9 is a safe browser to use unlike the now dying Internet Explorer 6 that Microsoft is actively trying to put to rest (www.ie6countdown.com). The first feature is Tracking Protection. Internet Explorer 9 has two forms of tracking protection. The first is a last minute addition of a Do Not Track header which was added in at the last minute that will be able to tell web sites that you don't want to be tracked, once laws are established requiring sites to comply with the header. The second tracking protection feature is the inclusion of Tracking Protection Lists. These are lists of websites that Internet Explorer will block from loading on your computer, therefore they will be unable to track you since they cannot run the tracking code or load the image/animation required to track you. Websites normally track you by loading the same image or piece of code across multiple websites (they buy ad space on lots of different websites) and every time it loads on your computer, it can tell which site it was from and use that to build up a list of sites you visit in order to target advertising at you. Tracking Protection Lists are designed to block these sites by stopping them from being allowed to load their content.
The second feature included in Internet Explorer 9 is called ActiveX Filtering. If you turn it on, it will block all ActiveX controls from loading on websites, unless you specifically allow them on that particular website. ActiveX controls are like small plugins you can install on your computer that allow your web browser to run small programs to display content. The two best known ActiveX controls are Adobe's Flash Player and Oracle's Java Runtime. There are a lot of unsafe ActiveX controls out there and also a lot of unsafe websites which will load deliberately malformed files into ActiveX controls such as Flash Player and Java to exploit holes in them and attack a system. This is why this particular feature is useful, it can stop these controls from ever being loaded on websites that you don't trust and allow them to be run on sites you do trust such as Youtube (which requires Flash Player).
Finally, the SmartScreen Filter introduced in Internet Explorer 9 has been upgraded and it now will warn you if you're downloading a commonly known virus, before you run the file and also if you're downloading a file that isn't commonly downloaded by other people that hasn't been verified as safe. As usual, the other security built into the browser called Protected Mode (which has been present since Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista) continues to protect users of Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Vista and 7 as long as User Account Control has not been turned off. Protected Mode stops Internet Explorer or ActiveX controls running in Internet Explorer from accessing the system to make malicious changes.
Windows 7 Specific Features
This is about it when it comes to what you'll get with Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Vista. You get a very functional web browser with advanced security technologies, standards compliant rendering and hardware acceleration, but there's a few extra features that are exclusively for Windows 7 users. These are those features. If you don't have Windows 7, then feel free to skip to the conclusion.
Pinned Tabs
Microsoft is trying to blur the line between applications installed on your computer and web apps you use such as Facebook, Twitter & Ebay. To do this, in Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 9, you can drag websites to the taskbar and pin them there just like you can with programs installed on your computer. So you might have Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Word & Adobe Photoshop pinned to your taskbar alongside Facebook and Twitter and they'd be treated the same way. This is my Windows 7 taskbar.
As you can see, it has lots of normal programs you expect to see, as well as Windows for Facebook and Twitter! So you might think that these are just links to the website, but they're actually a lot more functional than that. Firstly, try right clicking one, it actually has a jump menu just like other Windows 7 programs. These custom commands are actually coded into the website, so when the page loads, the commands in the jump menu can be updated, which means that websites can update the menus as needed, so a "Fresh Articles" section could be created in the menu which updates as new articles are published.
Another awesome feature that these pinned sites bring is that they can send notifications to you using Icon Overlays. This is something Windows Live Messenger has been able to do since Windows 7 was released (showing your availability as Available (Green, Busy (Red), Away (Orange) or Offline (Gray). Well now websites like Facebook can also leverage the same functionality. The best example to show you is how Facebook uses notification Overlays to show you that you have new notifications/messages/friend requests. So now I don't even have to be on the Facebook website to see if I get a new wall post. It's great!
There are a number of other features revolving around streaming music which allows websites to theoretically put Previous, Pause & Next buttons on the thumbnail previews that pop up when you place your mouse over an icon in your Taskbar (like media player has). As you can see, the point here is to blur desktop and web apps with each other and it's a really nice touch!
Finally, when you opened a pinned site, rather than a normal Internet Explorer window, there are a number of small changes made to the window. Firstly, the Back & Forward buttons change colour depending on what the website wants them to be. So pinning Bing to the taskbar makes these buttons yellow, Twitter makes them light blue, eBay makes them Red. Secondly, the home button is removed and is moved to the left of the Back & Forward buttons and instead of displaying the normal House, it displays the site's icon. I personally think they could have done much better with this feature, by removing (or allowing you to remove) the address bar and tabs, so it feels like Facebook is an application on your computer rather than a site inside Internet Explorer, but that might come in version 10.
Conclusion
My conclusion on whether or not you should use Internet Explorer 9 depends on what type of computer user you are. If you're a Firefox or Chrome user who use lots of extensions/add ons, then you're probably going to want to stick with those browsers, but if you have a friend who just uses the Internet for visiting websites and needs a simple web browser, then installing Internet Explorer 9 for them is quite adequate. My point is, whatever you've heard about Internet Explorer in the past, it's poor security, it's poor web rendering, how bloated and slow it is etc, is not true anymore, the problems have finally been fixed. You should really give it a second chance and not write this version off like the last three versions that have been released. Saying all this, regardless of whether you choose to use Internet Explorer as your primary browser or not, you should install Internet Explorer 9 on any Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 machine, simply because even though you might not use it for web browsing, Windows does use some of the underlying Internet Explorer components for certain functions and the more up to date and secure version you have, the more safe you'll be, so install Internet Explorer 9 is a very good idea. You can download Internet Explorer 9 from www.microsoft.com/ie and it installs in about 3 minutes with minimal prompting. Please let me know your experiences with the browser, I've had positives ones, but I'd like to know your experiences.
When you explore Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, please pin it to your Taskbar, we have a custom Jump List! :D
