Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser
Virgilio Raposo
Today in San Francisco, Microsoft will officially unveil Internet Explorer 9 and make it available to the general public. It is, without question, the most ambitious browser release Microsoft has ever undertaken, and despite the beta label it is an impressively polished product.
A closer look at the Internet Explorer 9 beta (screenshots)
I sat down with Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer division, earlier this month for a first look at the IE9 interface and a discussion of Microsoft’s goals and its competition. Since that meeting, I’ve been using the IE9 beta extensively on multiple PCs, including my primary desktop and notebook computers. Based on that experience, I have some preliminary answers to the questions you’re asking: Is it fast enough? Is it compatible enough? Is it cool enough to win back former IE users who have switched to other browsers, first to Firefox and more recently to Google Chrome? And will this shiny new browser be able to rehabilitate the tarnished Internet Explorer brand?
Here’s my report.
With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft is trying to make the browser disappear.
Not literally, of course, and not completely. In a world where PC users spend more time on the web than on any other task, and where apps are increasingly moving online, being able to quickly and accurately render HTML markup and execute script is more important than ever. But the notion that rendering a web page has to be done in a branded browser is old-school thinking, according to Microsoft.
In four earlier platform previews, aimed primarily at developers, Microsoft has already shown off some of what it’s delivering in IE9: dramatically improved performance, thanks to hardware acceleration and an improved JavaScript engine, along with a relentless emphasis on compatibility with modern web standards.
The missing piece is the previously top-secret IE9 interface, which Microsoft publicly unveiled today. When I asked Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer division, what drove the design of the new UI, he described the guiding design principle with a question: “How can we quiet the browser so that the site shines?” The answer is in the screenshot below (click to see full size):
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What’s different? Compare that IE9 page with the same page shown in IE8—and most other browsers, for that matter.
The most obvious difference is what you don’t see on the screen. For starters, there’s no branding beyond the logo on the Taskbar button—the familiar blue E. There’s no text or logo in the title bar, nothing that screams or even whispers “Internet Explorer.” Like Windows Explorer, the browser’s primary role is to be a frame that hosts content as unobtrusively as possible.
All but the most essential interface elements in the browser have been removed or hidden in IE9, by default. As a result, the contents of the site you’re viewing don’t have to fight with logos, toolbars, menus, and buttons. There’s no search box in the upper right corner. The command bar and Favorites bar are hidden. There’s no status bar along the bottom. The Refresh and Stop button are in gray instead of color, and three gray buttons in the upper right corner offer access to the Home page, Favorites, and Tools, respectively. (All of those buttons change to color if you pass a mouse pointer over them.) Tabs for open pages are smaller, crisper in design, and located in a band to the right of the address bar. The only element that’s bigger and brighter than its predecessor is the blue Back button in the top left corner.
I get into the nitty-gritty of the IE9 user interface in more detail on page 3 of this report, but a few high-level details are worth noting here. In the interest of “quieting the browser,” warnings and dialog boxes no longer pop up and demand your attention. Instead, notifications and action buttons appear in a discreet bar along the bottom of the window, where you can address them at your convenience. In IE8, these warnings and notifications (of blocked pop-up windows, for example) appear as dialog boxes that interrupt the task at hand. Downloads are the same way. In IE9, all of those interruptions appear at the bottom of the window, where you can defer your decision (or ignore a warning completely) while you continue to browse. The notification shown here is tied to a simple but effective download manager.
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Tab management in IE9 has a few new touches, including the ability to tear off tabs and drag them into a new window or dock them to the side of the display.
Like Google Chrome, IE9 combines the address bar and search box into what Microsoft calls a Private OneBox. Bing, not surprisingly, is the default search engine (you can change that setting), and if you turn on Bing suggestions the address bar does an admirable job of sorting through your history, favorites, and live search results as you type:
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The most interesting innovation in IE9, and the one that has made the greatest impact on me as I’ve tested IE9 over the past two weeks, is a new feature called pinned shortcuts, which allows you to treat a favorite website as if it were an application.
There are many, many security improvements on top of those already in IE8. In the beta that I reviewed, several of those features (which depend on server-side code) were not yet enabled. I will cover those in a future post.
Oh, and IE9 feels wicked fast.
A few caveats are in order before you head off to try out the new browser. It’s still a beta, and even in the final release you can expect compatibility issues with some websites (I explain why those issues are inevitable in the discussion on Page 4). IE9 works best with Windows 7, and can be installed on Windows Vista with Service Pack 2. For a variety of reasons, it is incompatible with Windows XP, and that situation will not change between now and the final release.