Review: Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer is considered a bit of a dinosaur: big, slow, and a bit clunky. If that’s the case, then IE9 is more like a velociraptor. Whether this raptor can catch Firefox remains to be seen, however.

IE9 is fantastically streamlined and there’s no denying that Microsoft has learned from the trends visible in the slimline Chrome. The address bar – filled with informational icons – nudges the tabs aligned alongside it, with a menu wheel tucked off to the right. I found the tabs alongside the address bar cluttered and they confused my usual interface navigation, but they can be moved to their usual spot below it.

For old IE hands, the main difference you’ll notice, apart from the inevitable menu reshuffling and slick design, is the speed. As long as you’re on Windows 7 and can upgrade to the new version, you’ll be immensely pleased at how fast it delivers even heavily-architected and animation-laden sites.

If you’re a Firefox user wondering whether it’s worth checking out the latest IE, I have six words for you: download manager and address bar search.

Microsoft has finally implemented a download manager – for many, the reason they left IE behind somewhere after version 4 – and it performs well. You can pause and resume longer downloads, as well as open downloaded files. There’s no option to show the download folder, but that’s a minor niggle. You can also now search using your default search services just by typing search terms into the address bar.

Another nice touch is the new unobtrusive messages – at the base of the window, where they can be a little too easy to miss.

Finally, tabs now behave sensibly, to my mind, in that you can drag them into a new window, or between windows, and there’s a ‘most popular sites’ selection available when you open a new tab. You can also pin a tab to the start menu, though unlike most other browsers’ ‘pinning’, this has the effect of turning a web page into an application, launchable in IE from the start menu.

Under the hood there are improvements as well, such as GPU acceleration and more support for HTML5, though it still doesn’t fare particularly well in the HTML5 standards test – it rated only 130 out of 400. Microsoft says this is because it has taken a conservative approach, only implementing HTML5 standards that are stable.

Microsoft has bundled in several new features that address privacy and security. When you download an application, for example, IE9 uses a reputation estimate to determine whether it might be bad. It’s crude, but it will at least pop up an extra warning. In addition, Microsoft now has a Tracking Protection List support. Essentially, this lets you download lists provided by third party sites that block downloads such as JavaScript or cookies from sites determined by those sites to be unacceptable. The value of this is dependent on whether you agree with the values of the third party, and it’s hard to see it being widely used, not least because IE9’s intro screen doesn’t make much of a song and dance about its existence. Options such as this are becoming more necessary in our world of zombie cookies and the like, however. You can also browse privately, and delete your browsing history easily.

How does it compare? It’s fast, and it delivers much-needed speed benefits and useful features to the many IE users out there – upgrade right now, if you can – but I can’t see it winning over the Firefox faithful. Not that it isn’t an excellent browser, but it really offers nothing significant that Firefox lacks.