Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9

After many months of devel­op­ment, Microsoft has final­ly fin­ished work­ing on Inter­net Explor­er 9, which was released to mar­ket a cou­ple of hours ago (9 AM Pacif­ic Time). This iter­a­tion of the brows­er rep­re­sents Microsoft­’s first real attempt to make stan­dards sup­port a pri­or­i­ty, and sports some new use­ful fea­tures. If you’re run­ning Win­dows Vista or Win­dows 7, it’s worth downloading.

About the first thing many peo­ple might notice when start­ing up Inter­net Explor­er 9 is the min­i­mized user inter­face, or UI. Mim­ic­k­ing Chromi­um, Microsoft has com­bined the address bar and the search bar, but it has gone a step fur­ther by squeez­ing tabs onto the same row as the com­bined URL and search bar. Addi­tion­al­ly, the sta­tus bar is now hid­den by default.

I can under­stand the log­ic behind these deci­sions, but I don’t agree with them. A UI refresh should always be backed by sol­id justification.

In this case, I feel like that jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is missing.

To me, brows­er tool­bars and menus are like the con­trols on my car’s dash­board. They’re essen­tial for brows­ing, just as the car’s con­trols are for dri­ving. While it’s true that I am usu­al­ly look­ing at the road through my wind­shield, I need to be able to adjust the car’s set­tings quick­ly (with­out hav­ing to press too many but­tons) to dri­ve com­fort­ably. I am not inter­est­ed in a min­i­mal­ist user inter­face; I want an effec­tive and effi­cient user interface.

Like oth­er users, I keep a great many tabs open simal­ta­ne­ous­ly, and I want a tab bar that stretch­es all the way across the screen so I can see more tabs at once.  I also appre­ci­ate hav­ing a sta­tus bar so I can see URLs when I hov­er over them (and so I can see how a serv­er is respond­ing when I try to load a web page).

I would con­sid­er IE 9 unus­able if it did not offer users the option to reur­rect the sta­tus bar and force tabs to be on their own row.

For­tu­nate­ly, it does. All it takes to restore the sta­tus bar and to decou­ple the URL bar from the tab bar is to right click at the top of the screen and choose “Sta­tus bar” and “Show tabs on a sep­a­rate row”.

I do like that IE9 looks more pol­ished. IE8 nev­er quite felt to me like it com­plete­ly meshed with Aero. I also like the new pin­ning fea­ture, which allows IE9 users to pin a web­site to their Win­dows 7 taskbars for easy access.

IE9 is also faster, although it still does­n’t hold a can­dle to Mozil­la Fire­fox, which has raised the bar again with Fire­fox 4, the forth­com­ing ver­sion of its cross-plat­form brows­er. But it is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over past ver­sions of Inter­net Explor­er. Many web­sites look much-improved, includ­ing those that were tak­ing advan­tage of fea­tures in Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (CSS) and Hyper­text Markup Lan­guage (HTML) that were not pre­vi­ous­ly supported.

As a devel­op­er, I’m excit­ed about Inter­net Explor­er 9, because it’s replac­ing Inter­net Explor­er 8 (and 7). As a user, I’m not that excit­ed, because Fire­fox is my pri­ma­ry brows­er, as I allud­ed to ear­li­er. I like Fire­fox for four key reasons:

• It’s cross-plat­form. I like hav­ing the same brows­er avail­able to me on Win­dows, Mac, and Kubun­tu. Fire­fox’s Sync ensures that my book­marks and brows­ing his­to­ry are with me no mat­ter what OS I’m using.
• It’s free soft­ware. Any­one can help improve Fire­fox because the code is open source. Fire­fox’s license requires any­one who makes improve­ments to con­tribute them back to the community.
• It has an unpar­al­leled selec­tion of add-ons. Fire­fox is unmatched in terms of the addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty that can be added into the brows­er through exten­sions or themes.
• It’s rugged. I put Fire­fox through a lot as a pow­er user. Occas­sion­al­ly, Fire­fox does crash, but when it does, it always recov­ers my brows­ing ses­sion for me. Crash-han­dling has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved late­ly, and plu­g­ins now fail grace­ful­ly instead of break­ing everything.

With all that said, con­grat­u­la­tions to Microsoft for all it’s done to imple­ment sup­port for web stan­dards in this release. Devel­op­ers have been wait­ing for Microsoft to get to this point for a long time.

Thank good­ness IE9 has final­ly arrived.