Microsoft Internet Explorer 9: What’s the fuss all about?

September 15, 2010 By Nick Mokey

Microsoft’s latest browser introduces some truly innovative new features. Here’s what’s new in Internet Explorer 9.

America’s favorite – well, most installed – Web browser is back for another round. And with its market share sliding, Microsoft seems like it might actually want to impress us this time around. Internet Explorer 9 rises to the challenge with an impressive new set of features – including some you can’t find in any other browsers. Check out some of the new and noteworthy additions to Internet Explorer 9.

Hardware Acceleration

Imagine if the six construction workers watching one guy jackhammer away at concrete stopped spectating and actually did some work of their own. The construction in front of your house would be done in half the time. That’s pretty much the same technique Microsoft uses to speed up IE9.

Internet Explorer 9 employs your computer’s graphics processor – the one that normally sits around twiddling its thumbs when you’re not playing Starcraft II – to render Web pages. The result: Your CPU can take a breather, and pages still load faster.

Compact Interface

Our first reaction upon opening IE9: What happened to all the crap? Microsoft has finally gotten the hint about toolbars and icons cluttering up the user experience, and condensed IE9 into one of the most minimalist browsers out there. Even the address bar and tabs bar, which share different rows in Chrome, have been crushed together onto one line to save vertical space. While you can restore the old stuff with a simple right click, this is the most stripped down – and clean – Internet Explorer has ever looked.

Windows 7 Integration

You had to know Microsoft would leverage its position as the maker of Windows to make IE9 play nicer with the OS than any other browser will. And it has. With this iteration, you can pin websites to the taskbar as shortcuts the same way you typically would with a program, making it easy to access your favorite sites with one click, whether you have a browser open or not.

Address bar search

Google Chrome’s most revolutionary original feature has finally made it over to Internet Explorer with IE9. One bar handles both addresses and search terms, so you don’t have to decide which you’re entering and tab over to the right box. About time.

Performance advisor

Plug-ins and add-ons are great… until you accumulate so many your browser crawls under the weight of them like a Harley Electra Glide. Sure, the cup holders and CB radio are nice, but you wanted it to actually move, right? Microsoft has wisely started accounting for the extra weight with a new performance manager that shows you exactly how long, in fractions of a second, each new addition tacks onto your browser load time and navigation time. Fenders not worth the extra time off the line? Chop ‘em.

New tab features

A revamped “new tab” page in IE9 automatically arranges the sites you most frequently visit, and color codes them with bars that indicate how much time you spend on them. You can also “tear off” tabs to produce new windows.

Showing 27 comments

John Hetherton at 10:23pm 29th December 2010 Just to clear: Computers are useless, all they do is give you answers. Besides, when all is said and done, more will be said than done and we all know that there are only three kinds of people in this world, those that can count and those that can't. 90% of all this is just opinion anyway, the other half is fact.
Shashi Natrajan at 5:04am 18th September 2010 Author is just fooling. Take the features described by the author. Sure - the author and article appears to be funded by MS. 1. Hardware Acceleration - Crap... World is moving lightest , super performer browser on hand helds, netbooks. 2. Compact Interface - Take a look at Chrome. It's the best. 3. Windows 7 Integration - True - It means incompatible on other os either your favorite Mac or Linux box. 4. Address bar search - feature xeroxed from Chrome. 5. Performance advisor - Far superior is Firefox - with its add-ons [ tons of it -- you decide what feature you want ] 6. New tab features - Again xeroxed from Opera [ Opera is the best in its class ] This browser - is not going to help Microsoft to take any additional market share. Its Chrome / Firefox / Opera will have the dominance.
DisgruntledGoat at 8:54am 17th September 2010 You forgot to mention this new feature: it takes *ing ages to download! It's been "downloading required updates" for about 10 minutes now and its only a third done. In that time I read this and several other articles and the comments AND installed the latest version of Google Chrome (the previous version didn't want to update itself for some reason). I agree with "Neighborhood Troll" about the interface, it's not better. Cramming everything into one line means fewer tabs and less of the current address visible. They could have at LEAST put the full page title in that wasted space at the top.
FreebieJeebies at 2:52am 17th September 2010 Glad to see all the usual IE clutter has been ditched from the interface. Looks quite neat in my opinion.
ionut at 11:27pm 16th September 2010 yeah, Opera was always with a step in front of others!
Harry Worth at 10:05pm 16th September 2010 "Google Chrome’s most revolutionary original feature"? Opera has had that feature forever.
Cassandra_IE_Team at 7:05pm 16th September 2010 Hi Nick, Thanks for writing this overview of the new features of Internet Explorer 9. You presented the features in a very clean and easy-to-understand way (much like IE9 :)...sorry that was a bit cheesy). For anyone wanting to download IE9 or see some websites that are taking advantage of what IE9 has to offer, visit www.BeautyoftheWeb.com/?mtag=digitaltrends @bagomice - tear-off tabs is one of my favorite features as well. I also like being able to pin sites to the taskbar. Cheers, Cassandra IE Outreach Team
bagofmice at 5:52pm 16th September 2010 Tear off tabs? I've been waiting for that.
Darisu at 4:18pm 16th September 2010 Wow, it's just like Chrome. Impressive!! Hey wait isn't Windows like the Mac interface? Hey, wait isn't the Zune kinda like an iPod. Hey wait where's the MS iPad??
1. Plague_spores at 4:40pm 16th September 2010 Where do you think Mac's got their interface? They launched their first GUI computer with Windows preinstalled because they needed an OS and Gates had one. Acting like Windows copied Mac shows age.
  1. neotheologian at 1:07pm 17th September 2010 Xerox PARC. Just sayin'.
lamnasud at 3:39pm 16th September 2010 since you dont know what you are talking about i want to congratulate you on beeing able to post a comment. Good for you! "the game" you might be referring to would probably be html5, and "tomorrow's web development" is still not helped in any way by IE trying to compensate poor implementation by using additional hardware, the same hardware that is running your fancy desktop if you are using Aero and not " twiddling its thumbs". MS has been just as "a head of the game" since they launched the MSN network last millenia.
1. SeanM at 10:32pm 16th September 2010 For the record, hardware acceleration makes very complex pages scroll much smoother it also is useful for pages the make heavy use of the new canvas and video tags in html 5, not something that's easy to notice on every page but is still welcome. It's also worth noting that FireFox is starting to integrate this as well, and it's really just a matter of time before the rest of the browser follow suit. The taskbar integration is nice but Chrome's beta has been doing the same thing for about a month now. The vertical spacing is about the same as google chrome, but once again, not an innovative design. IE9's javascript engine has been completely rebuilt from IE8, is much faster, way more standards compliant but still not as fast as chrome or most other webkit based browsers. I played around with it for a couple days before going back to my chrome beta. As a web-developer I'm excited that this will probably be in the hands of most of my customers soon since it way easier to build for but ultimately I personally don't see any reason to switch from Chrome.
Barius at 3:18pm 16th September 2010 "Yet again MS is ahead of the game on the critical issues of tomorrow's web development" --Randolph All I can do is stare and slap my forehead trying to grasp the enormity of your ignorance. That's like saying that Microsoft is ahead of the game by introducing the Zune three years after Apple introduces the iPod and then claims it's ahead of the game because it's brown. Honestly, WTF??
dusanmal at 3:12pm 16th September 2010 Google Chrome’s most revolutionary "feature" Address bar search is not a feature but clear attempt of Google to monopolize user Internet experience by mixing Internet protocol and addresses and Google search terms in Google Browser (underlining Google many times is intentional). While IE9 has an option to pick search provider, there is no user advantage in copying this "feature". Or has as much as if some car manufacturer would decide to place brake and gas controls on the same pedal. The only reason for it is the design fashion and I have had enough of it. Real feature should benefit user. If user is confused by 2 (two) bars, he has some other problems. Again, search term and URL are completely different things one types for completely different reasons and completely different expectations for the result. With URL I know exactly where I want to go and want to go there immediately. With search term I want many results to compare and explore while NOT knowing where I will end.
1. lamnasud at 3:31pm 16th September 2010 Nice peice of trolling there... You know.. if you haven even tried chrome you shouldnt comment on it. You can select seaarch provider in chrome to you know. Even Bing if you want to. I dont wee the problem, enter an URLif you want to, or a search term if you want to. If you typed the URL correctly you will end up at the url, and if you typed with your tiny forhead you will get a couple of suggestions. And if you just enter a search term you will get your suggestion available for comparison.
jond at 3:05pm 16th September 2010 I see a bottle of AJAX just hit troll on the head. (for the record I love chrome).
Randolph at 2:53pm 16th September 2010 Hey Troll, Hardware acceleration is a feature added so that more can be done in the browser, not to solve an existing issue. Yet again MS is ahead of the game on the critical issues of tomorrow's web development (for another example, xmlhttprequest anyone?).
Neighborhood Troll at 10:07am 16th September 2010 Let me clarify some of the points made by this article. Most installed has no bearing on user opinion when there is no option of removing it. Even when a computer user is exclusively browsing the web with Firefox on a Windows machine, they still have IE installed. Does that really equate to ANYTHING like favorite? So why does the article even try to make this assertion? Sure, the article calls itself out, but the author isn't fooling anybody here. Hardware acceleration seems to be the most advertised part of IE9. But when does the typical user actually see slow-down on a webpage? I've never experienced page-display lag on standard HTML. Notice I say page-display, and am not basing this on the time it takes to download the HTML and associated content from the server. Where I have seen slow-down is with pages heavy in scripting. And it's funny that Microsoft isn't touting its advancements in the JavaScript engine it has; have there been any? Go try running various JS benchmarks and see how "fast" Internet Explorer really is. The "compact interface"--that "does even more than Chrome"--does not save any more space than Chrome. Look at the titlebar. Oops, it's blank. That's where Chrome puts the tabs. So by IE9 giving an entire line of blank space, the user gains what? A feeling of emptiness? Cleanness? And IE9 is praised at saving vertical space? So I suppose it is a lot less than previous versions of IE, but it still doesn't gain anything over Chrome. Instead of giving a full screen width for tabs, IE is cutting that down to about half. Look at some of the most popular extensions to Chrome and anyone can see multiple tab-managing extensions. It's because there isn't enough screen width for all the tabs a typical user opens, but IE9 has less space for tabs than Chrome. I don't understand the bit about Windows 7 integration. That sounds like a marketing stretch (so what is it doing in a "news article"?). And to be honest, this is nothing new and it is definitely not Windows 7 or IE9 specific. Go back to Windows 98, and throw any .url file onto the quicklaunch bar. If Firefox is the default browser, does this give "Windows 98 integration" status to Firefox? Not anymore than IE9 putting .url files on Win7's quicklaunch--should I mention that the quicklaunch bar has been merged with the taskbar, or would that be too obvious? I could go on, but I'd rather not waste my time. Anyone who has used Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or others would know that most of these features from IE9 are too little, too late. They aren't impressing anyone except those still using IE6, IE7, and maybe IE8.
1. Tim James at 2:16pm 16th September 2010 I don't think the author of this article was trying to fool anyone. When he said "most installed" he was being sarcastic, meaning he knew fully well IE was on a Windows computer by default. Guess that went over your head.
  1. Lucas at 2:49pm 16th September 2010 Don't feed the troll.
2. Lakawak at 3:16pm 16th September 2010 But the fact that it is BY FAR the most USED browser as well as installed, means that it is the most popular.
3. ang at 3:53pm 16th September 2010 i don't see why you spent so much time bashing the article. all the author did was highlight newer features & updates making IE better. for those of us who wanted to read about what was new and improved about IE, the article was good and served a purpose. it's a waste of space to have you post a bunch of negativity b******g about why you think it's not up to par. the article was the author's opinion. your comment was your opinion- so what makes your's any better?? obviously, nothing!
4. Prashant at 1:16am 17th September 2010 Learn more about Windows 7 integration before u start whining about the topic. Internet Explorer 9 has true windows 7 integration. eg. if u pin the facebook url to windows 7 taskbar, its not just a shortcut that opens the facebook homepage...the pinned shortcut will have inbox,newsfeed,friends and all that stuff right in there...thts how the integration is done.
5. @_the_mad_hatter at 7:30pm 17th September 2010 Um, you mean there are people who still run Windows? How perverse.
  1. Walter at 7:29am 18th October 2010 How quaint!
  2. qwertykal at 4:36pm 9th March 2011 Why? Is there a problem with running a system that is loads better than Mac OS X's shiny shoebox? I will take Windows anytime on a desktop. Can't speak for Android though. I'm sure it is quite good.