The new user interfaceMany of the key decisions that define how IE9 works were made, literally, by the numbers. Microsoft has mountains of real-world data from its opt-in Customer Experience Improvement Program for Internet Explorer 8, drawn from hundreds of millions of sessions from tens of millions of IE users. Mining that data allows planners to figure out what Windows users do (and don’t do) when browsing, and they can test hypotheses and feature refinements in the field and in formal usability lab testing.
Microsoft shared some of those numbers with me. It’s shocking to see exactly how unpopular some well-established power-user features are among the public at large. For example, I love the Quick Tabs feature in IE (which displays thumbnails of all open tabs), but that puts me in an elite group—only 1.7% of all IE users ever use this feature. By contrast, 73% of IE users have hovered on the Windows 7 taskbar button to find a tab, and 59% have closed a window using the close button on one of those Taskbar thumbnail previews.
In that spirit, one of the biggest changes the IE9 designers made was to hide the command bar and replace it with this pared-down Settings menu.
The classic full menus (Page, Safety, Tools, and Help) are still available with a tap of the Alt key. This shortened menu should make those menus unnecessary for the great majority of common tasks.
With that data-driven approach to identifying and refining common tasks, it’s understandable that there are few new power-user features in IE9. In fact, if you like to push apps to the extreme, you might decide that Microsoft has gone too far in “quieting the browser.” I initially was surprised to discover that the Quick Tabs shortcut (Ctrl+Q) didn’t work. After exchanging a few e-mails with Microsoft, I learned that Quick Tabs view is now disabled by default; you need to dig into the Internet Options dialog box to enable it (I’ll explain how in an upcoming companion piece.)
I asked Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of IE product management, to explain why they made the design decision to hide Quick Tabs. He explained that the that they “intentionally ‘demoted’ the Quick Tabs feature due to the fact that Aero provides a much better way of finding and switching to the right open tab. With Aero Peek, you can actually see the full page so that you don’t have to rely on the thumbnail visual.” He added, “It’s still a beta, and we will continue to take feedback.” Based on recent experience, though, I don’t expect to see that feedback result in fundamental changes in the user interface. What you see in this beta is likely very close to what you’ll see in the final release.
According to Microsoft’s numbers, Favorites (aka bookmarks) represent another once-popular feature that has declined in usage. Only 18% of IE users have ever clicked on the Favorites bar, and only 1 in 100 have ever created a folder there. The result? The Favorites bar and Command bar are hidden in IE9, and you have to jump through some extra hoops to re-enable them. Except for a change of position (moving to the far right of the screen) the design of the Favorites menu is essentially unchanged from IE8.
Most of the time, according to Microsoft’s data mining, you’re browsing to a site you’ve already visited before. When you open a new tab in IE8, for example, the numbers say there’s a 47% chance you’ll just start typing in the address bar and use AutoComplete. For revisiting URLs that have been saved in the browser’s history or as a Favorite, AutoComplete works very well, just as it did in IE8.
The new about:Tabs page, which appears by default when you open a new tab, makes it even easier to return to your most frequently visited sites.
Here, too, power users might scream at the lack of advanced customization options. From a design standpoint, that page is gorgeous: clean, consistent, easy to read. The colors in the histogram-style bars for each page are picked by sampling the site’s favicon and indicate how popular each page has been. (I’m not sure exactly how the algorithm picks sites for this top-10 list, but in my testing, after a few days of frequent use it does a solid job of picking the sites I visit most often.) But the list is strictly mechanical. You can click the X to remove a tab (and add the next entry on from IE9’s list to the top 10), but you can’t change the order of tabs nor can you pin tabs here.
One of IE8’s innovations, tab groups, remains unchanged in IE9. When you Ctrl+click a link (or right-click and choose Open In New Tab), the new tab opens to the right of the current tab, and both the original tab and the newly opened one pick up a shared distinctive color that identifies them as a group. You can continue that process, adding new tabs to your color-coded group. From the Favorites menu, you can right-click on a folder and choose Open In Tab Group, which opens all the shortcuts from that folder in a color-coded group, and you can right-click on a tab to remove it from the group or close the entire group. But the one thing you still can’t do with tab groups in IE9 is save that selection of blue or purple or orange tabs as a group. Given the numbers—Microsoft says only 15% of IE users have ever used this feature—that’s an understandable, if disappointing, design decision.
In any other browser community, many power-user features might be handled with add-ons or extensions. There’s no shortage of tab-tweaking extensions for Firefox, for example.
But IE has never been a playground for writers of free add-ons, so the chance that a slew of power tools will magically appear shortly after IE9’s release is slim indeed. (Developers, please consider that a challenge and prove me wrong.)
The IE8 add-ins I tested worked without any hassles, except for the glitch with pinned sites that I noted on the previous page.
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