After a few years of Firefox (Free, 4.5 stars) chipping away at Microsoft’s dominant browser position, Internet Explorer’s real threat emerged just over two years ago: Google’s Chrome. While Chrome has gone from nothing to over 10 percent of browser use, Firefox has held steady, and Internet Explorer has steadily declined. Microsoft knew they had to do something big to fight back against Chrome, and IE9 is the result of these efforts. It’s a huge advance from the Internet Explorers of the past. But is it good enough to take the browser crown from recent favorite Google Chrome? The release candidate is available for download today, so I’ve decided to give it the review full treatment.
The release candidate of IE9 is even faster than the beta, adds more HTML5 support, and it sticks with that software’s trimmed down UI, giving the most space to the webpage of any browser. Microsoft has also built in the unique new Tracking Protection feature for added privacy. Finally, it tweaks tabs, search, and its unique pinned site capability that places site icons in the Taskbar.
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Setup
If you’re running the IE9 Beta, there’s no need to uninstall it: IE9 RC will replace it, and will become your only version of IE. There are already language versions in Chinese traditional and simplified, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and German in addition to English, with many more presumably to follow. But remember, IE9 only runs on the most recent flavors of Microsoft’s operating system—Windows 7 and Vista—and there are separate installers for the two and separate versions for 32-bit and 64-bit editions. After downloading the correct installer, running it takes longer than installing Chrome, Firefox, or Opera (Free, 4 stars), and, also unlike those, it requires a reboot and OS updates.
Specifications
Type
Business, Personal, Enterprise, Professional
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS, Windows 7
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First Look at the New Browser
At first blush, the Release Candidate of IE9 looks identical to the Beta. The new trimmed-down window header even still has the back arrow button clipped off to give space to the Web page. Then I noticed that the tabs look squared off (I prefer the slightly rounded corners of the beta’s, but Microsoft reps told me testers wanted more space for tabs), and moving the browser around the screen seemed snappier, though the PCMag.com home page seemed jumpy while I resized its window.
Most pages displayed correctly, but occasionally I saw jumbled text, though this usually corrected itself when I scrolled down and back up on the page. This happened on a PCMag review page. And on one test machine, the browser occasionally just stopped responding, even preventing me from switching tabs. Not long after this, I encountered a “Not Responding” error, with the browser window going dim and the blue doughnut spinning. After IE9 recovered from this, I checked out typing in our Vignette content management Web app, and, as in the beta, the characters appeared with a delay after my typing—something not evidenced by Chrome.
Interface
As mentioned, the interface is nearly identical to that of the IE9 beta. Its minimalist window leaves more room to the webpage contents than any other new browser, keeping controls to a single row and combining the address and search boxes into one. It’s not as drastic, however, as Google’s reduction of the interface to a single gear icon, and you can still enable IE’s menus and toolbars, by right-clicking on the top window border.
Tabs
Microsoft has improved tabs work in IE9, bringing them up to date with the competition’s. IE9 lets you drag tabs out of and back into your browser window to create new windows, as other browsers have done for a couple years. It even does a couple cool tricks with dragging tabs to a new window: If you do this while playing a video, the video continues to play as you drag it. Also, when you drag to the left or right edge of the screen in Windows 7, the new browser window created fills exactly half of the screen. This is as it should be—adhering to Aero Snap in Windows 7—but other browsers don’t do this.
The release candidate brings a couple more new twists to tabs: you can now place them on their own row if you find you’re opening too many to fit. The tab with the focus is now brighter, making it stand out. I quite appreciate that I can now close a tab without switching to it, as I can in every other modern browser. But this only works if the window was sized large enough—nearly full screen on a laptop. Since IE crams everything on one row—the address/search box, tabs, and controls—tabs can get mighty narrow. But there’s some help for that: RC introduces arrows on either side of the tab bar if you open too many tabs to display in the allotted space.
The new tab page helpfully shows your most frequently visited pages. Now there’s also a “Discover other sites you might like” icon and link at the bottom which encourages you to use the Suggested sites feature. This has been present in previous versions. Some consider it a privacy risk.
Pinned Sites
Instead of trumpeting its own branding, IE9 gives the site you’re visiting center stage. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the new pinned-site feature. By simply dragging a webpage’s icon down to the Windows 7 taskbar, you create a pinned site. This gives the site equal billing with an application. This is strongly reminiscent of Google’s idea of having every app be a Web app. With its pinned sites, IE9 actually goes further than Chrome in this regard.
Chrome does have Web shortcuts, but they doesn’t get IE9’s OS integration. This includes Windows 7 jumplists for sites that supply the necessary XML data in their code. IE9 pinned sites not only get their own taskbar icons, but their favicon is used where a browser logo would normally be, in the upper left corner of the window, and even the back and forward buttons take on the color of the site icon.
The logo and colors for pinned sites are automatically grabbed by the browser for display in the window border. If you navigate to a different domain, they remain the same as the original pinned site, which struck me as a bit disorienting. One final difference for pinned sites is that the Home button disappears from the menu bar.
New for RC, you can now add multiple sites to a pinned-site icon. Just open a new tab, right-click on the site icon, and choose “Add as a home page.” Though I think that wording could be clarified and the feature made more obvious, the feature offers a convenient way to open a set of frequently visited sites.
Pinned sites are a big ace-in-the-hole for IE9, at least for Windows 7 users, and now site owners can promote their sites for pinned treatment and offer buttons on their pages that pin a site automatically. But Chrome’s application shortcuts have the advantage of giving the whole window to the site. Microsoft’s giving full app citizenship to sites is nevertheless commendable.
The One Box
Internet Explorer team lead Dean Hachamovitch used to criticize Chrome’s use of a combined address and search box, citing privacy concerns, but IE9 now has a single text box for addresses and search, too, called the One Box. Hachamovitch told me that IE9’s version adds privacy, by letting you turn on an off the autosuggest feature of your search engine at will.
The IE9 One Box doesn’t offer Chrome’s brilliant Instant feature, which loads previously visited sites before you even finish typing their address, but at least it lets you choose among search providers at the bottom of its dropdown suggestions.
The Release Candidate brings one helpful new behavior to the One Box: After you enter a search and get your result page, the box doesn’t switch to a URL, but instead your search terms remain there, in case you want to further refine it. RC also fixes one One Box peeve of mine: you can now enter searches like “site:site domain” to limit results to a specific site.