With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft gets to show off some of its best work to an audience that is increasingly indifferent and hard to please, and in some cases downright hostile and dismissive. It is not an enviable task.
By any objective standard, Microsoft has succeeded at the task it set out to do: build a fast, standards-compliant browser with a clean, modern design that integrates well with Windows 7. But is that enough to preserve its shrinking lead in an increasingly competitive field of browsers? Can it convince defectors to end their experiments with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and return to the fold? Can it excite web developers and kick up its own tempo to keep up with younger, faster competitors? We’re about to find out.
Today in San Francisco, Microsoft is scheduled to officially unveil the release candidate for IE9. Years ago, I probably would have waited until the final shipping code to do a formal review. In the new, engineering-driven Microsoft, the RC label means exactly that: this is ready-to-ship code, out for one final spin to smoke out those pesky bugs that hide so well from automated testers. It’s ready to review. (To answer your question preemptively: No, Microsoft isn’t offering any hints on when the final release will be ready.)
I’ve been running an escrow version of the IE9 RC for several weeks, on a variety of desktop and notebook PCs, and earlier this week upgraded to the final RC bits. It is a solid, polished package, and I have no trouble recommending it to anyone running Windows 7 or Windows Vista. (Sorry, XP users. This is yet another reason to upgrade your OS.)
You will find echoes of other modern browsers throughout IE9. But this is no clone or copycat, and in fact it has a few features that other browser developers would be wise to copy. IE9 has its own distinct personality and visual style, especially when compared side by side with archrival Google Chrome.
The basic design of IE9 should come as no surprise if you’re one of the 23 million or so people who downloaded and installed the IE9 beta between its September 15 release and now. I’ve already looked at that build in great detail; if you haven’t seen my
Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser , I highly recommend that you go back and read it, just so you can get up to speed.
I won’t repeat my observations from the beta review here. Instead, I want to focus on some of the new features that have been added post-beta. Pinned Sites can now include multiple tabs, for example. There’s a new, very impressive Tracking Protection feature that gives users the upper hand (at least for now) in the ongoing skirmish with advertisers and marketers over online privacy. And if you’ve avoided IE because it lacks a way to block Flash-enabled sites, pay attention: the RC adds a new feature called ActiveX filtering that could easily be called FlashBlock Plus.
Ultimately, this long-awaited IE upgrade is a conservative and populist product. Much of its design is data-driven, based on input from the two biggest sectors of Microsoft’s enormous Windows-using base: managed corporate networks and nontechnical, mom-and-pop PC buyers. That focus creates an inherent bias to make things simpler, with fewer options. The resulting product might be a little too simple for browser elitists or those who prefer lots of tweaking options.
If you gave up on IE years ago because it was slow or buggy or insecure, it’s worth taking a second look at IE9, now that the beta label has been removed. (The installation is pretty low-risk: It’s easy to uninstall, and you can continue using your current browser as the default while you test.)
Performance in this build of IE9 is noticeably improved over the beta and better than any IE version I’ve ever seen. As usual, I’ll leave it to those with better lab setups to perform the detailed benchmarks, but in my experience, IE9 can keep pace with the fastest modern browsers. It no longer deserves to be called a slowpoke. Using the GPU for some page rendering tasks makes an especially big difference in performance.
Many of the most significant changes in IE9 are future-oriented, with solid support for HTML5, CSS3, and other emerging standards. Those changes are a big deal to developers, but it might be months or years before you see those technologies in widespread use. Meanwhile, IE9 does a decent job of coping with compatibility issues for current web pages that were designed for earlier IE versions.
In the rest of this review, I’ll look more closely at the IE9 user experience, at privacy and security features, and at how well it handles the crucial sticking points of performance and compatibility.
The IE9 user experienceYou can almost see the tiny hairs rise on the back of an IE9 developer’s neck if you describe the browser as minimalist . It’s refined , you are told. It is site-centric. Since the beta, IE’s designers have done even more refining and polishing. They’ve shaved a few pixels off the browser’s frame. Elements in the UI that add noise and distraction are hidden (although you can easily restore the status bar, the Favorites bar, and the Command bar if you are willing to sacrifice some screen real estate for information). The browser’s chrome doesn’t compete for your attention with the page you’re viewing.
By default, IE9 puts the address bar and the browser tabs on the same row. That saves a lot of space compared to the default configuration in Chrome (57 pixels for IE9 versus 81 for Chrome, by my calculations). Here, see for yourself:
If you keep a relatively small number of browser tabs open at any one time, this arrangement works well. According to Microsoft, 99% of the IE9 sessions they’ve tracked during the IE9 beta have 8 open tabs or fewer (a session is a single frame window). That leaves enough room to see the title for each tab without consuming too much space.
But that 1% of tab-heavy sessions inspired what Microsoft characterizes as “super vocal feedback.” (Translation: beta testers screamed bloody murder.) Bowing to the pressure, Microsoft added a new customization option in the RC: the ability to position the tabs on a separate row, below the address bar. (No, there’s no option to move the address bar above the tabs.) Even in that configuration the IE9 layout is still 1 pixel more efficient than Chrome. And as a close look at the IE UI demonstrates, the claim that IE9 is a Chrome clone is just not accurate.
Another new feature that wasn’t in the beta is the ability to navigate directly to a pasted URL. Chrome and Safari offer a Paste & Go option when you right-click in the address bar. IE9 lets you right-click anywhere on the page and choose Go To Copied Address from the shortcut menu (if the Clipboard text isn’t a valid URL, the option is Search Using Copied Text). The effect is the same.
As the hint at the end of the menu item advises, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+L.
In my beta review last September, I pointed out that IE9 is at its most effective when paired with Windows 7, where you can pin a web site shortcut to the taskbar and treat it as if it were an application. In the RC, Microsoft has improved this feature by giving you the ability to have multiple home pages associated with a single Pinned Site. In my case, I can keep the ZDNet home page, the WordPress editor, and Google Analytics in a saved group, pinned to the taskbar where they’re a click away.
A web site developer who takes advantage of the ability to create custom jump lists can really make a site shine. Amazon.com, for example, has done a good job of making these swipe-and-click menus useful for site visitors. And a new feature in the RC makes it possible for a developer to add a snippet of code to any element on a page so that it becomes draggable or pinnable.
One problem I noted with Pinned Sites in the beta release is that add-ins don’t work, Microsoft says that’s by design. The result, unfortunately, is that popular password managers like LastPass and RoboForm aren’t available in Pinned Sites. If your credentials aren’t cached, you’ll have to enter your username and password manually.
Two flaws in the beta made a disappointment out of IE9’s all-in-one address and search bar (called, not surprisingly, the One Box). Both have been fixed for the RC. You can now use advanced search syntax in the One Box (like IE9 review ed bott site:zdnet.com ) and get the results you’re looking for. If the search doesn’t return the right results, you can now click to return to the search box with your previous query intact, after which you can edit the search terms or switch to an alternative search engine. After six months of using this approach, I have no desire to return to a separate search box, and I rarely open the Favorites list.
Finally, Microsoft has refined (there’s that word again) its handling of notifications. Beta testers complained that some notifications were “nagging,” such as those indicating that a pop-up has been blocked. In the RC, those alerts now disappear automatically instead of hanging around indefinitely. Conversely, a few notifications were a little too subtle. The notifications for background downloads has added some subtle animation to help make it more obvious when the download is complete.
source:zdnet
