Netbook Network

New, modern browsers are miles ahead of IE8 in terms of speed, security, features, and more. We’ve gone hands on with one browser, Opera 11, showcasing its set of features some unique to the browser itself. Yesterday, Microsoft answered the call for a modern browser with a browser of their own – Internet Explorer 9. Sporting a completely overhauled interface, a new JavaScript engine under the hood, and tons of new features, IE9 is by far the best version of Internet Explorer yet. Check after the break for a hands on tour.

If you haven’t installed Internet Explorer 9 yet, you can do so by heading over to its homepage or installing the next batch of Windows Updates.

Right off the bat, you’ll notice the new IE9 interface. The tab bar has been placed next to, instead of below or above the address bar. All the menus have been compressed into three buttons on the right – Home, Favorites, and Settings – similar to the Opera menu button or Chrome’s settings wrench. Opening new tabs will take you to a “Most Popular Sites” page – similar to the one in Chrome and Speed Dial for Opera. You may be wondering if the fact that the tabs are in  the way of the address bar is a nuisance – it’s not. Chances are you won’t have more than five tabs open anyway, and there’s still enough breathing room in the address bar to see most of it. The address bar has been merged with the search bar, just like Chrome and Opera (again!) – but I didn’t see a way to set your own search engines, so you’re stuck with Bing (for now).

A huge plus for netbook owners is that Internet Explorer 9 takes up the least screen space of all browsers. The status bar is gone too, leaving a lot of browsing space, more than Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or any other browser I can think of.

Opposed to having separate windows for each download, IE9 also sports a new download manager. You can view all your downloads in a nice little box, displaying speed and time next to each, and you can pause and cancel the downloads on-the-fly. I like it a little more than Firefox’s download manager, as it’s cleaner and more evenly spaced.

There are major improvements under the hood as well. IE9′s new Chakra JS Engine runs along just as fast, or sometimes faster than Chrome. Full hardware acceleration is in play when rendering sites and HTML5 objects. If you jump over to the IE9 Test Drive page, there’s tons of HTML5 demos and speed tests for you to try out. In the image above, I’ve got 1000 fish in the FishIE tank demo running at a solid 49-50 frames per second using hardware acceleration. If you’ve got Nvidia Optimus, watch out – IE9 might make use of your ION chip (which takes up valuable battery life) – you can turn it off with this guide here.

We’ve covered how to pin websites to the taskbar in Chrome, and it’s even easier in IE9. Simply grab onto a tab, and drag it right onto the taskbar. Some sites like Twitter may even have jump list support – and we’re looking into that too. The pin-to-taskbar feature of IE9 has convinced me to creating a new favicon for the site, in which you can see in the image above.

There’s lots of stuff that we haven’t covered yet in the new Internet Explorer 9. In fact, some of the features might be enough for you to switch to it as your primary browser. It packs with speed, a new interface, and quite a few unique features that make it by far the best Internet Explorer yet – up to par with most modern browsers these days. To get yourself your own copy of IE9 installed, you can either wait for the next batch of Windows Updates, or you can manually download IE9 at its website which can be found here.