Friday, September 24, 2010

Top new features in IE 9

Internet Explorer 9, currently in development, will have complete or nearly complete support for all CSS 3 selectors, border-radius CSS 3 property, faster JavaScript, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles, and hardware accelerated rendering using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Microsoft has confirmed that Web Open Font Format (WOFF) will also be supported.

Design and User Interface:

Microsoft claims with the new design more of a web page can be seen than in Firefox even if it’s only by a few centimeters. It appears that Chrome actually allows you to see a bit more of a page, but honestly the difference in space really seems insignificant to us.

Most of the layout changes should be pretty obvious: the menu bar has been removed and the navigation controls / address bar are now at the forefront. We don’t need to tell you that it looks a lot like Chrome, our guess is that Google’s not exactly flattered by that since we’re actually feeling the look of IE9 more than the cartoony aesthetic of Chrome, but we realize that’s a personal preference. The compatibility view, refresh and stop buttons have been just latched on to the address bar and there are dedicated favorite and tools buttons on the far right side.

Performance:

IE9 Beta owes much of its speed boost to the new hardware acceleration features inside the browser. It passes off the most complex rendering tasks animations, video and heavily-styled text to the graphics processor, and its new JavaScript engine (which Microsoft calls Chakra) is capable of using your PC’s extra processing cores to execute scripts on pages.

The enhancements to the JavaScript engine were evident when I ran some of Microsoft’s official demos on its test drive site, as well as in the SunSpider benchmark suite. In real-world applications, like Gmail and Facebook, the browser’s speed and behavior was very close to what I normally see in Chrome and Firefox. There were a few things that didn’t work as advertised, like the chat windows in Gmail. They failed to minimize properly, preferring to dumbly blink when I clicked on them. Developer’s tools are built in (just hit F12) if you want to dig into the DOM or measure performance.

Pinned Sites:

This isn’t one of the most obvious new features of IE9, but it may just be our favorite. If you keep the some web applications open all day like Gmail, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, but mistakenly close them when they are lumped together with a bunch of other sites. IE9 lets you separate out those sites and lock them right to the Windows Taskbar. You drag a site to the bar, and when pinned it pulls the favicon so it looks like it’s actually a separate program. Some sites will also support jump lists, which is the list of shortcuts that appears when you right click the icons

One Box:The address bar in IE9 still doubles as a search field, but it now has more capabilities. The default search engine is obviously Bing, but you can install Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook and lots of others through the Add-On page. You are actually becoming bigger fan of Bing by the day, and keeping it as the default search engine has its advantages: typing in terms like “Weather NYC” brought up the temperature and conditions inline, the bar also displays history results.

Tab functionality:

Tabs aren’t new to Internet Explorer, but Microsoft’s added a few new tricks. They’re really easy to snap out of place now, and even if you’re doing something like playing a video in YouTube, detaching it doesn’t lose your place as content is continuously rendered. Like Chrome, there’s now the ability to just shut down one tab when a website starts to hang. Instead of having to shut down the entire browser, you can go into the task manager and just kill that particular tab. The new tab page shows frequently visited sites along with a meter of how actively you visit them.

Download manager:

IE9 adds a real download manager that lets you see what you’ve recently downloaded as well as see the progress of a current download. Our program downloads appeared in the manager, but oddly a picture download didn’t. It also has a SmartScreen Filter, as it’s been dubbed, that alerts you to security issues. Alerts appear within the browser window now rather than as a pop-up.

4 comments:

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