Fast. That’s pretty much everyone’s consensus on Microsoft’s newest iteration of their web browser, Internet Explorer 9. The new browser is fast, clean and more importantly – more secure than ever before. Don’t believe us? You can try it out here for yourself.
While you’re waiting for the download, let us give you the summary of what makes the IE 9 great, at least to the Redmond firm’s eyes. The design is much, much cleaner than their previous effort, with most of the clutter gone. All you get with the standard build is the address bar (which doubles as a search bar using the search engine of your choice), back and forward keys and the current tabs you have open. You can add plug-ins to the experience if you wish. Prompts for remembering passwords appear in an unobtrusive bar located on the bottom.
You can now pin your favorite sites directly to your taskbar, just like an application. Once there, it gets its own large icon so it looks like any other program you have on the taskbar. Another great thing about pinned sites is that you can right click on them and a jump list appears, allowing you to jump straight to a page if the website was made with IE 9 in mind.
Another nice touch is the search bar/address bar. Not only does it pull double duty, but it also is able to display instant results to items that you type on it. Pretty cool. One particularly excellent new feature of IE 9, one that users won’t see right away is its ability to utilize a PC’s GPU to render pages and content. Traditionally, a PC’s GPU isn’t used by the computer to render pages on the web, and it sits idle whenever you go online. This isn’t the case with IE 9, and it shows.
Again, you can download IE 9 from here if you want to try it out.