Two years have passed and since I shared my impressions of Internet Explorer 8 and once again it is time for me to review the latest version of the browser that no web developer can ignore but many would like to.

   So without further ado here is what you can expect:

   

User Interface Changes

   Internet Explorer 9 has reduced the number of buttons and toolbars on the screen by default in an attempt to copy Chrome's minimalistic UI. The goal is to allow websites to look and feel like native applications in the OS. In addition to reducing the browser frame IE9 provides an option to pin a website to the Windows 7 taskbar just like you would do with a normal program. This changes the frame design using the colors of the favicon and allows the site to integrate with the jump lists using special APIs.

   I consider myself a power user of a web browser and I like the controls of the programs I use as a power user exposed which does not mean they should be ugly. The latest version of Office with its Ribbon interface is the way I prefer my UI. Luckily you can enable the toolbars that are hidden by default. The only toolbar that has significantly reduced its functionality is the status bar which only has zoom control and still I have enabled it.  You can also move the tabs on a separate line as they are on the same line as the address bar by default.

   The best thing about the UI in comparison with other browsers is how well the tabs integrate with the Windows 7 Aero Snap. It is possible to create a new frame from a tab while simultaneously snapping it to the side to get half screen size. You can also pin a tab to the taskbar by dragging it.

   

Features

   New features worth mentioning include built-in download manager, ActiveX filtering and better privacy protection. The download manager is self-explanatory. ActiveX filtering allows you to turn off all ActiveX plugins by default and enable them on per site. It can serve as a flash blocking utility except that it blocks all plugins. The privacy protection is an evolution of IE8's "In Private Filtering" that can be turned on and off per site and also allows importing of third party lists. Notable omission is the lack of built-in spellchecker. Luckily there are plugins to do that. Overall I feel IE9 is not doing well in terms of features compared to IE8 that provided a lot of cool stuff like Web Slices.

   

Performance

   Internet Explorer 9 is fast. It has fast UI and fast execution and rendering speed. When I say fast I mean Chrome fast. Naturally IE9 beats other browsers in MS designed tests and loses to other browsers in their respective tests. It is a well-known fact that each browser is the fastest browser (according to the tests designed or chosen by the browser vendor) so this is nothing new.

   

Technology

   Internet Explorer 9 sports a new JavaScript engine that can interpret the JavaScript code using one thread while compiling it using another. The new engine is comparable to other vendors' engines in terms of speed. However the most important part is the GPU hardware acceleration of all the text and graphics in the browser. This leads to dramatic improvement in the performance of graphics intensive pages using a lot of canvas objects, a lot of SVG or video. This is what the MS tests focus on and in these tests Internet Explorer 9 is remarkably faster than the competition.

   I personally consider the hardware acceleration a brilliant strategic move by Microsoft. Other browser vendors have already began implementing hardware acceleration in their products but even if they beat Internet Explorer they will still beat it only on Windows. Other platforms (notably Linux) are known for poor hardware acceleration support and bad drivers. Even if other browsers manage to port the hardware acceleration to other platforms they will need to fork the code thus increasing their development and maintenance costs significantly. In theory they could go for OpenGL and have some level of portability but for some reason Mozilla have gone for DirectX on Windows.

   Here comes the biggest downside of Microsoft's new browser. The fonts are somewhat blurry with the new DirectWrite rendering. The new fonts are supposed to scale better with zoom and also will look fine on high DPI displays (read the Windows Phones). However on standard low DPI monitors they just look bad… like they do on a Mac where this method has been used from the start. Luckily you can force compatibility view and get the old and better font rendering back while throwing away all the web standards work of the Internet Explorer team. Who cares about standards anyway?

   

Standards and Developer Features

   The most notable addition from the HTML 'standard' are the elements Canvas, Video and Audio. As we already known they are totally useless. Of course the useful input types are not included but hey your canvas is hardware accelerated!

   To my surprise Internet Explorer 9 kicks every other browser's ass on Google's Sputnik test suite designed to test for JavaScript standards conformance. If it was an MS designed test I would not mention it but this one comes from Google so this victory is remarkable. Remember this for your next "IE does not follow standards" argument no matter on which side you are.

   The new developer tools can capture HTTP requests so there is no need to install Fiddler anymore unless you need to debug a lot of HTTP requests in which case you probably need the power of Fiddler because no other tool I know of is so powerful when it comes to http traffic sniffing. No, Firebug's is a toy compared to Fiddler when it comes to HTTP!

   In addition you can now force the browser in Internet Explorer 8 mode to develop for the previous version if you need to. The compatibility button still makes the browser act as version 7. Developers can use meta tags to request IE7 or IE8 behavior.

   Of course every new version of every browser is bad news for developers because something will break for sure. What is even more interesting is that XP is not supported which is of course expected as XP is not sold anymore. This makes Internet Explorer 8 the last version available to XP users. Combined with the fact that version 8 ships with the remarkably popular Windows 7 this means that this version is here to stay. As a co-worker of mine put it "8 is the new 6".