Just Browsing, Thanks

 

Will IE9 go down in history as one of the world’s great explorers?

With so much of my time spent online browsing the internet, it is nice to use a browser that enhances this experience. Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) certainly ticks a few boxes as far as ease of use and features at your fingertips go.

IE 9 is only available for Microsoft Windows 7 or Microsoft Windows Vista systems. So, if you are still running Windows XP (about 40 percent of the market still), you will have to wait until your next system update.

The first thing I noticed with IE9 is its simple and clean interface, putting as much focus as possible on Web content and not on the browser itself. All unneeded buttons and controls have been eliminated, and tabs are now at the top of the browser. Web pages are what you focus on, with very little to distract you. There's not even a search box as the address bar now doubles as the search box.
Three small icons on the upper-right corner of the screen give you access to IE9’s options.
A Home button, a Favourites button and a Tools button. That’s it, no clutter.

More nice features when you open a new tab; it displays thumbnails of pages you frequently visit. At the bottom of each thumbnail is a bar that shows how frequently you visit each page. You can do some other very useful things from this page as well, including reopening your last browsing session and reopening tabs you've closed during this browsing session. No more retyping URLs.

The next great thing I noticed was the smooth fast loading of pages. Among the biggest complaints against previous versions of Internet Explorer was its lack of speed. However IE9 has come out tops against all the other browsers in speed tests.

In Windows 7 with IE9, you can pin a Web site to the taskbar by dragging its URL to the taskbar. The site's icon then appears in the taskbar; to visit the site, click the icon.
Great for those I-go-to-all-the-time sites.

Finally, one of the most important new features is the SmartScreen Filter. When you download a file in IE9, the SmartScreen Filter uses a new download reputation feature to examine the file's reputation. Things like how many other people have downloaded the file, and if they have found it to be safe or malicious. It doesn’t stop you downloading if you want to but should help minimise the risk of infection from malicious software by warning you.

Happy browsing

Cliff Salter
www.pchardware.co.nz