Microsoft launches IE9 beta

Dave Bailey, Computing, Wednesday 15 September 2010 at 19:15:00

Microsoft de-clutters the interface, promises faster performance

Microsoft launched the first beta of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser
today, highlighting its stripped-down interface and features designed to make
accessing web sites faster.

UK web product manager Ian Moulster said Microsoft decided to give IE9 a less
cluttered interface after analysing data from its
Customer
Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).

"We looked at how many browser features they use, and it's not as many as
you'd expect. They interact with the site much more than they use the browser,"
explained Moulster.

The analogy Moulster used is that of people going to see a play. They expect
the theatre to be helpful to them ? providing seating, lighting, and sound ? but
what they're coming to see is the play.

"In our analogy the browser is the theatre and the web is the play," said
Microsoft's UK Web Product Manager Mark Quirk.

New features in the browser include the ability to "pin" a web site to the
PC's taskbar, and to combine the address bar with the search engine query bar.

Quirk said pinning web sites makes them quicker to access.

On the security front, the most noticeable enhancement is a new download
manager.

When users download content such as applications from untrusted sites, IE9
will scan the download for viruses, and inform the user as to how many times the
content has been downloaded from the web site.

Options to delete the download or continue are then presented to the user.

Other features include an add-on performance adviser, which alerts users to
add-ons that are causing the browser to load slower and suggests fixes.

The IE9 beta also has a new "hang recovery" feature that prevents user
information being lost in the event of a browser instance crashing.

The latest
NetMarketShare
statistics show IE's global market share down a quarter of a per cent to
60.4. Mozilla's Firefox browser share is unchanged on 22.9 per cent, with Google
Chrome up 0.4 per cent to 7.5 per cent.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2269843/ie9-user-interface-goes