Microsoft is batting 1,000 lately. First it hit a home run with Windows 7, and now it's knocking the ball out of the park with the latest version of the Internet Explorer Web browser.
Internet Explorer 9 is still being worked on, so you can't get the finished version yet. But you can download the beta, or test, version if your PC is running any Windows 7 PC (or any Windows Vista PC equipped with Service Pack 2, called SP 2). Sorry, IE 9 won't run on any other versions of Windows.
You can get the free IE 9 beta from
here. IE 9 will also be free when it is officially released.
IE 9 has many improvements over earlier version of Internet Explorer.
It's faster displaying pages -- it uses the video card in your PC to help out, as long as you have Win 7 or Vista, which are designed for that -- and it displays Web content very well.
Like Apple's Safari browser,
IE 9 knows how to take advantage of HTML 5, the latest code for anything shown on the Web. HTML 5 improves many of the features of a Web page, especially video. (Apple has been pushing HTML 5 as a way to avoid Adobe's buggy Flash software, used in nearly all Web browsers to show old-fashioned video. HTML 5 video loads faster and is much less likely to crash the browser.)
IE 9 is also the first Microsoft Web browser designed from the start to be safe. Whether it actually is safer than competing browsers isn't known yet, but my first impression is favorable. This is the first recent version of Internet Explorer that I felt comfortable using.
What many newcomers to
IE 9 may balk at, however, is the minimalist browser screen. Microsoft obviously looked carefully at Google's browser, Chrome, and decided Chrome's out-of-sight menus made sense.
In both
Chrome and
IE 9, menus pop out when you click on a small button but otherwise remain hidden. This provides extra "headroom" at the top of the screen.
