Microsoft Unleashes Windows Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Microsoft Unleashes Windows Internet Explorer 9 Beta

The software giant's next Web browser rises to the challenge posed by Google Chrome 6, Firefox 4, and Safari 5.

Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
Sept. 15, 2010

Before a crowd of about 200 journalists and industry partners, Microsoft on Wednesday introduced the public beta of Windows Internet Explorer 9, latest iteration of its Web browser and proof that the company can still compete.

Dean Hachamovitch, corporate VP at Microsoft, described IE9 as "A browser that uses the whole PC and puts sites at the center of the experience." What he means by that is that IE9 looks to Windows for both graphics processing power and user interface improvements, often in ways that attempt to shift the focus of computing away from the browser and back to the PC operating system.

IE9's Pinned Sites feature, for example, is sure to create headaches at Google. Pinned Sites are Web site bookmarks that have been dragged into the Windows task bar. They can include Jump Lists, menus that allows direct navigation to specific areas of a Web site. Doing such navigation from the task bar and Jump Lists rather than through the browser means less searching. No wonder Google plans to introduce an operating system of its own, Chrome OS, shortly.

The tone of the launch event at the San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center was decidedly modern. The musical prelude to the keynote featured an avant-garde band that included a harp of sorts with strings that stretched perhaps fifty feet upward and across the concourse atrium. The band would've seemed at home in a variety of near-future science fiction films and served to convey Microsoft's message that IE9 is something new.

Close watchers of the browser wars may recall that "modern browser" has been a term invoked by other browser makers that pointedly excluded IE6 and IE7.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, characterized the launch as part of Microsoft's attempt to not be seen as a dinosaur. He pointed to the upcoming release of Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect as another proof-of-life launch for the company.

IE9's most significant feature is its support for hardware-accelerated HTML5. It makes rich media Web sites really fast and creates a whole new set of possibilities for Web designers. IE9 also includes a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that utilizes multicore CPUs for further speed improvements. Without speed, other browser features don't really matter.

IE9 includes strong support for HTML5. Browser inconsistencies remain but finally Microsoft isn't a laggard when it comes to Web standards.

The overall look-and-feel of IE9 is much more elegant and streamlined than its predecessors. Users of Chrome or Firefox are likely to recognize changes like the One Box, which combines the search dialog box with the address bar.

The Add-on performance advisor will show users when an add-on is slowing down the browser. According to Hachamovitch, add-ons cause 75% of all crashes in Internet Explorer.

Jeff Henshaw, principle group manager for Bing, was on hand, to showcase how IE9's hardware acceleration could make the Bing experience better, specially better than what Google had to offer, though Microsoft's archrival wasn't mentioned by name. "Sometimes ten blue links, no matter how fast they're rendered, are not enough to solve the complex tasks and decisions you're trying to make," he said.

He showed off an upcoming revision of Bing, available in preview form in about a month, that will include live video on its home page and line counts for search results that vary based on their position on the search results page.

Among the many partners Microsoft assembled for the event, there was considerable interest in IE9's improved speed and its Windows integration.

Jason Hoch, VP of product development at Discovery Digital Media, expressed enthusiasm for IE9's capabilities, particularly the task bar integration. As to measuring IE9's impact, Discovery had only just started supporting Pinned Sites and Jump Lists and couldn't offer metrics, he said.

Chris Keating, senior product manager at IMDB.com, said that IE9 is significant because it supports HTML5, which allows for rich media capabilities without a plug-in. He also cited the value of hardware acceleration. "I could open [IMDB.com] in Chrome, but you'd see speed differences around the hardware acceleration piece," he said.

Internet Explorer 9 is available in 33 languages from beautyoftheweb.com

I don't use IE except to get M$ updates and for sites that don't render very well on Firefox... which is becoming more rare as time goes by.

Oooooh, I can hardly contain my excitement that the monolith of mediocrity in the technology industry is about to release another clunky, bloated, bug-ridden, critically security flawed browser

lol

Yeah, it is a bit bloated. It reminds me of Norton System Works. In the beginning, it was a good program. Then as they improved on it, it became a resource hog from hell. That's when i quit with them and went to freeware protection (currently AVAST & Comodo).

Browsers like Firefox and Opera have taken it to new levels.

IE 9's big deal is that it will be able to make use of hardware rendering (your graphics card will be able to draw the shit you see on screen). And this is awesome!

I HAVE given the beta a go, and it's actually fine, in terms of speed it is almost on par with Firefox 4 (which also has HR) and if all you do is browse one page at a time (like check webmail) it's actually lighter and starts up faster then either Firefox or Opera.

I think I will give it a miss, I rather cherish my bank and credit card details