Microsoft has made the announcement of IE9 availability for the Indian consumers. The beta version of the IE9 can be downloaded by consumers now and gives site centric browsing experiences.
Announcing the availability, Hemant Sachdev, Managing Director - Consumer & Online, Microsoft India said, "Consumers today use the Web as a source of entertainment, education, information and as a platform for communication. Keeping all these consumer needs in mind, we have made unprecedented investments to develop our latest browser, Internet Explorer 9 which has been made site-centric rather than browser centric. Clean and minimalistic looking, IE9 redefines browsing as we know it today, and deliver a whole new, beautiful online experience."
The new IE9 has some interesting features and upgrades from its past cousins. It offers the ability to pin a site, i.e. you can pin your favorite websites to the Windows taskbar for shortcut access. When users need to use more than one website to accomplish a task, the tear off tabs feature helps with side-by side comparison (using Aero Snap feature in Windows 7).
Another feature of the IE9, the add-on performance advisor notifies users when add-ons are slowing down their browsing session. The SmartScreen Filter integrates scans into the new Download Manager, using Download Reputation to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files.
The IE9 makes web navigation easier with features that are integrated with Windows 7 navigation, such as Jump Lists, Aero Snap, tear-off tabs, and thumbnail controls. This allows users to get to their favorite sites and content quickly and carry out common tasks for each site right from the Windows 7 jump list.
Microsoft began developing the IE9 in March 2010, and released the Beta version of the same in September 15, 2010. With IE9, Microsoft gives the user a very native experience of the web. Using full capabilities of Windows and hardware, IE9 enables a version of the Web that is faster and cleaner.
As we had mentioned earlier, IE9 can run only on systems with Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems. Systems running on Windows XP will not support IE9. This shortcoming may be helpful to other browsers like Mozilla and Chrome, which also provide hardware accelerated rich internet. However the one thing that differentiates IE9 from all other browsers is its tie up to HTML5.
The new browser from Microsoft caters to customers who love rich Web applications and developers who love to build them. In this regard Microsoft is tying up with many websites and global brands worldwide to show off the capabilities of IE9.
The IE9 has build a lot of curiosity among users and developers with its earlier platform previews. Now with the release of the Beta version, we hope it lives up to the hype created and gives the users the experience it promised to.
Some Features:
- Support for CSS3 and SVG and a new JavaScriptengine called Chakra.
- Better JavaScript performance.
- HTML5 audio, video, and canvas tags, and WOFF.
- JavaScript engine integrated into the core browser components.
- CSS3 2D transforms and HTML5 semantic tags.
- Improved performance, improved Tracking Protection, the option to pin multiple targets per page, and the option to add a new tab row.