Internet Explorer 9:First Impressions

The first thing you'll notice about IE9 is that it's essentially been Chrome'd. Most of the various toolbars IE8 presented by default can be redisplayed in IE9. Tabs, once kept below the address bar, have moved to the side. The separate search and address boxes have been combined, while the Home, Bookmarks, and Tools buttons have all shifted to the right. Bookmark menu functionality hasn't changed much since IE8, but the smaller browser menu makes it feel less intrusive.

One of IE9's new features is the ability to "pin" websites. Microsoft describes this as follows: "click the icon to the left of the web address... or the tab for the website, or the website's icon on the New Tab page, and then drag it to the taskbar... That's it. Once a site is pinned, it shows up as its own thumbnail, separate from Internet Explorer."

Positioning the tabs by the address bar (renamed the Go Bar) is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it does free up more screen space, but it also limits the amount of space available for tabs before they start becoming annoyingly tiny or pushing off the edge of the screen. Fortunately, right-clicking on a tab and choosing "Show tabs on a second row" immediately switches to a more standard arrangement.

If you gave up on IE years ago because it was slow or buggy or insecure, it’s worth taking a second look at IE9, now that the beta label has been removed. (The installation is pretty low-risk: It’s easy to uninstall, and you can continue using your current browser as the default while you test.)
Performance in this build of IE9 is noticeably improved over the beta and better than any IE version I’ve ever seen. As usual, I’ll leave it to those with better lab setups to perform the detailed benchmarks, but in my experience, IE9 can keep pace with the fastest modern browsers. It no longer deserves to be called a slowpoke. Using the GPU for some page rendering tasks makes an especially big difference in performance.
Many of the most significant changes in IE9 are future-oriented, with solid support for HTML5, CSS3, and other emerging standards. Those changes are a big deal to developers, but it might be months or years before you see those technologies in widespread use. Meanwhile, IE9 does a decent job of coping with compatibility issues for current web pages that were designed for earlier IE versions.

Here, Microsoft attempted to cut down on available options, but mostly managed to make the list more complex. Under the 'File' menu, for example, are multiple commands that, when accessed via MS's long-familiar Menu bar, are spread variously between File, Edit, View, and Tools. The Safety submenu (shown above) is similarly confusing. "InPrivate" Browsing isn't as intuitively clear as "Anonymous Browsing" or a similar term might be, while users almost certainly have no idea whether or not they need tracking protection. It's not clear what it means to "Check this website," and very few users actually understand ActiveX enough to know whether or not they want to filter it. All of these options are completely valid, but MS hasn't yet learned to get out of its own way when it comes to building intuitive UIs and logically grouping information.

IE9's 'Downloads' information box (opened via Ctrl-J) is another example of this problem. Chrome and Firefox (both 4.0 and 3.6) use this space to display all file downloads, including the list of files users' chose to save via right-click. Opera is a bit more limited and only logs information in the download manager if you specifically choose to "Save to Download" folder.

Internet Explorer 9, however, doesn't appear to enable this functionality at all. It'll tell you if you downloaded your latest video drivers but not where you saved the interesting photos you found on Flickr.  Another feature IE9 incredibly still lacks is the ability to right-click on an image and choose "Copy Image URL." In every other browser, copying and forwarding an image URL is a three-step process.  Step 1:  Right-click. Step 2:  Copy URL. Step 3:  Paste. In IE9, one must still right-click, select Properties, highlight the URL, right-click, choose Copy, hit Cancel (to return to the browser window) and then paste. That's seven steps, assuming that the user manages to highlight the entire URL the first time around.