IE 9 has arrived

I barely use IE not even for work well maybe for testing and things like but to be honest I do not use it very often, and if it were up to me, I would stop using it forever, but sometimes you are still stuck with web sites that only work with IE. Anyways yesterday its new version came alive, IE 9.

So I took one laptop from work because mine has windows XP and IE 9 only supports windows vista and 7, yeah we started with wrong foot here. So I took the laptop and downloaded it and here I am writing this post on IE 9.

The first thing I noticed is the tool bar, It looks like Chrome, with just some icons on the right side to access tools, go Home and bookmark web pages. One interesting thing is that only has one omnibox so it does not matter how many tabs you have all will share the same omnibox  which by the has a compatibility option when you go a web site that is designed to display better in older versions.

New Tab

The second thing I noticed is when you open a new tab it shows you your most visited pages, with colors indicating how often you visit those pages. You can remove them, you can't re-order them though. It also has options to turn related sites, Private browsing, re-open closed tabs and sessions. You pin sites and it has a built in SmartScreen Filter in case you visit a dangerous web site.

Compatibility View

Related Sites

This particular version is supposed to work with HTML 5 and it seems it does. I tested with a couple of sites and it was fast and smooth, the only site I had problems was Picasa, I couldn't upload pictures the uplowder wouldn't even show. YouTube had no problems playing videos in HD and by the way if you want WebM support you can download the plugin from here. You can visit the official site and see all the new highligths IE 9 has.

WebM plugin

If you ask me, it has nothing I have not seen before in browsers like FireFox and Chrome as usual it is trying to catch up with other browsers. Anyways, I like testing news versions that way I can give my personal opinion about them. IE is better than older versions that is for sure, does it have something new we have not seen before? not really.