On Wednesday, Microsoft officially released a beta version of Internet Explorer 9, the latest remake of the company's nearly-ubiquitous Web browser. A few months from now, it will become the built-in browser on all new PCs.
Most techies think of Internet Explorer as the first piece of software they replace on a new computer. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are the preferred browser brands among self-styled geeks. But IE9, as everyone calls it, has some features of its own that make it worth a test drive.
First and foremost, IE9 is amazingly fast. Past versions of Internet Explorer always seemed bloated and slow, especially compared to Google's Chrome. But I've been using both for a week, and Microsoft's browser keeps up with Chrome on my PC. (Full disclosure: Microsoft lent me an up-to-date laptop that shows off IE9 better than the bargain-priced netbook I usually work on.) The trick is what's called hardware acceleration. IE9 uses the PC's graphics chip, built to render video and games as quickly and flawlessly as possible, to display website graphics much faster than running them through the computer's main CPU chip.
Microsoft's engineers have also speeded up IE9's handling of Javascript programs inside Web pages, an area where Internet Explorer 8 and its predecessors had notably lagged behind the competition. In IE9, Bing's busy search and results pages appear within a fraction of a second, and I can drag a page with live video running inside it around the screen without causing the video to hiccup. There's also a built-in performance monitor for browser add-ons, such as custom taskbars, that are slowing down the browser. IE9 can shut down the slowpoke software to free your computer.
Second, IE9 incorporates some of the best features of other browsers. The first time you run it, stretch its URL input window to fill the width of your screen. Then, rather than typing in URLs or going to a search engine, you start any Internet activity by typing into the box. IE9 will prompt you to turn on search suggestions. Do that. Afterward, the browser will try to figure out if you've typed a URL, a search term, or the name of a page or site you've already visited. After a couple of days, you get used to typing Ctrl-L anytime you want to go somewhere on the Internet. It saves a lot of fumbling with the cursor and remembering what you can type into which box. The idea was popularized by Chrome, but if IE9 does it, that's one less reason to switch.
IE9 also includes a private-browsing mode, called InPrivate, that doesn't store your browser history, nor does it save any cookies set on your browser by sites you visit while in private mode. The obvious use for InPrivate is to cover your tracks when surfing adult content, so IE9 doesn't try to auto-complete porn URLs the next day at the office. But here's a non-illicit use of private browsing: I use it when power-researching a news topic that I know I won't care about tomorrow. Once I close the browser, all the URLs I hit--and any settings they tried to perform on my browser--are gone. I won't have fifty no-longer-interesting URLs dominating my browser history and its auto-complete function for URLs I type the next day.
Third, Microsoft has figured out that people now think of different websites (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay) as separate entities, the way we used to think of separate applications on our desktops back in the prehistoric 1990s. You can drag any Web site to Windows' taskbar, where it will self-install with an icon that makes it look like a different app from the Internet Explorer "e" on the same taskbar. The resulting row of icons visually resembles the apps on an iPhone, which each site treated as a separate app.
New programming hooks let Web site builders create custom pop-up menus that appear when you right-click on a site icon in the taskbar. Clicking an option takes IE9 straight to a specific part of the site. For example, if you drag movie review site Rotten Tomatoes to the taskbar, it spawns a tomato icon that, when right-clicked, pops up a menu whose options include Movies in Theaters and New on DVD. CNN, if pinned to the taskbar, offers pop-up links for News Pulse and Election Center. I'm sure many sites will spawn these quick-link options as IE9 becomes more popular. Putting popular sites in the taskbar, with pop-up links for their popular sections, is a much better use of screen real estate than pegging them to a Favorites bar atop the browser.
How stable is this beta release? I haven't had many problems, but occasionally I get a reminder that "beta" means "not totally bug-free yet." Sometimes IE9 mangles a news story's layout on msn.com, which is another Microsoft property. But that's part of the Internet's perpetual-beta culture. For most people, the speed boost and added utility make up for the occasional mis-rendering of a page.
Microsoft hasn't yet decided when IE9 will go from being only available as a download, to replacing IE8 as the built-in default browser on nearly all new Windows PCs. It'll be a few more months at least. But if Microsoft's triple-threat of speed boost, popular features, and app-like Windows taskbar integration keeps up, next year's PC buyers may not feel the need to replace Internet Explorer with something else.