Software : Hands on: IE9 review |
| Posted: 10 Feb 2011 08:13 AM PST  As of now you can download the release candidate of IE9 and although it's aimed at developers, this new version of IE9 is feature complete - so the final look and feel might still change, but this is everything you're going to get. We got time with IE9 today to bring you our hands on: Internet Explorer 9 review. There are a number of minor changes to the IE9 user interface, including slightly squarer edges to the tabs. As frequently requested during the beta, you can now put the tabs on a separate line to make room for more of them (right-click on any tab to choose this). The 'one bar' is still there, so you type URLs and searches into the same place, but there's an extra icon to specify when something is a search; click the search icon and it puts a question mark at the beginning of the search, telling IE to send it straight to your default search provider instead of checking to see if it's a valid URL first (you can type the question mark in by hand as well).
NEW TABS: Put your tabs on a separate line - by popular demand There's still no easy way of repeating your search on another search engine (something we miss from the separate search bar), but there is a quick way to open URLs that you've copied.
QUICK SEARCH: Search faster by putting a question mark at the beginning - the search button does it for you Right-click on any open web page and choose Go To Copied Address. It's nice that this works with URLs you copy from anywhere but annoying that the new URL loads instead of the page you're looking at rather than in a new tab; if you want both pages, it's no quicker than pasting it into the address bar. Tools like the Paste and Go add-on in Firefox give you the choice. What else is new in IE9? The options on the New Tab move around a little, and the Suggested Sites feature from IE8 makes an appearance, offering to find sites like the ones you visit frequently.
NEW LOOK: A slightly different interface; Hide Tabs moves down and Suggested Sites arrive More usefully, if you delete one page from a domain because you don't need your home page on the new tabs page, that no longer stops other pages on the same site showing up here if you visit them frequently. The info bar hasn't moved to the top of the screen, despite some user requests, but it has got easier to use. If you ignore an alert that isn't vital - like the notification that a download has finished - it will now go away on its own instead of waiting for you to close it.
SAVE POWER: If you're on a notebook and you're running on battery, IE9 slows its timer right down to save power Important warnings - like the suggestion that the file you're downloading might be malware (something Microsoft claims is as much as 40% likely for downloads IE9 warns you about), that won't go away until you click on it. We particularly like the Pause and Resume buttons that appear for downloads; if you pause a dialog, disconnect, hibernate your notebook and reconnect on a different network, you can continue your download seamlessly.
WAIT A MINUTE: Need to disconnect? Pause your download till you're back online Web sites can do a lot more customisation of pinned sites - including putting a button on the page you can click to pin the site, and having a page of options to customise the site pop up the first time you use the pinned site, which can include letting you pick what you want on the jump list. With a task on the jump list to go back and change those settings, pinned sites feel rather more like real apps. You can also put multiple tabs into a pinned site. There are a couple of extra features in IE9 RC and some that were in Platform Preview 7 but not in the beta, like supporting CSS 2D transforms for laying out images at an angle. The promised support for WebM is in IE9 RC; if you install the WebM codec and a web page specifies it, IE9 will use that instead of the built-in H.264. It doesn't solve the Web video arguments, but it does give developers the choice.
WEBM: Want to use WebM? Install the codec and IE9 RC will use it if the web site requests it Geolocation and tracking protection in IE9 IE9 RC adds one completely new spec that's increasingly being seen as part of HTML 5; geolocation. The accuracy depends on what the geolocation service knows about your IP address or Wi-Fi access point so it may not put you in quite the right place, but it's certainly close enough for looking up restaurants and tube stations - and the privacy options are very clear, so you know when you're giving away your location to a site and you can block location without having to see a dialog box every time.
FIND ME: The info bar lets you share your location once, always or never
SO NEAR: That's close to our location, though not exactly right The promised tracking protection is in the RC as well, and it comes with four lists of common tracking sites for you to use; you can block every ad service from tracking you or go in and turn different services on and off. Although the interface is mostly clear, the setting for which tracking sites you see in the list based on how many of the sites you visit use them needs to be phrased lot more clearly (the more sites that use a tracking service, the more information they can correlate about you so you care more about a service used on 20 sites you visit than one used on five, but you won't know that from the description next to the setting to filter by frequency).
DO NOT TRACK: The interface for managing Do Not Track lists for ads Other things you can turn off more easily include ActiveX; there's one option on the Settings menu to disable all ActiveX controls, but if you go to a site like YouTube that needs Flash for some videos (although the HTML 5 videos on YouTube work well in IE9 RC), you can re-enable just the controls you want.
IN CONTROL: Don't want to use ActiveX controls? You can turn them all off and then reinstall one by one if you really need them (like Flash, say) IE9 performance Performance continues to improve with IE9; the JavaScript Sunspider benchmark runs 35% faster than in the beta and Microsoft says that translates to faster performance on real web sites too. As a lot of the performance is coming from GPU acceleration, there's a new option to let you turn GPU acceleration on - or off if you have a machine where the CPU would actually be faster.
GPU OFF: If your GPU isn't up to the job of hardware accelerating you can turn it off (our test notebook didn't have a good enough GPU to start with) There are few surprises here; Microsoft is refining IE9 and offering solutions for a couple of the loudest complaints but it's not changing direction or adding any features where the specification isn't finalised. There's no word on a final IE9 release date (although we expect it to be at Microsoft's MIX conference in the middle of April). UK IE9 product manager Mark Quirk told us that he expects to see a final platform preview before then, but not a second release candidate. "Hopefully we're not that far away from getting the release product," he said, but as usual "we'll ship it when it's ready".
2D: IE9 RC includes CSS 2D support, which is what makes these postcards sit at a jaunty angle |
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