All the hackers out there can download IE9, start hacking away at it from tonight and do their best to ruin its alleged greater performance, improved reliability and enhanced security. IE9 takes advantage of hardware acceleration to boost web performance, including making use of multi-core processors and using a PC's GPU to accelerate graphics rendering.
The browser's new features include pinned sites, which lets users pin a website directly to the taskbar, hang protection to further isolate tabs from each other, and the notion of trusted downloads to combat malware.
Under Windows 7, a pinned site can display a jump list of options for that site to allow users to create a new message in a webmail site, for example. IE9 also takes on the colour scheme of the pinned site to become even less conspicuous.
Hang protection builds on the crash protection added in IE8, and stops open tabs from being affected if a script inside another tab is "running away", Microsoft said.
The UI is very minimalist, so it is as unobtrusive as possible, according to Microsoft, fitting the address bar, search box and buttons all onto a single line at the top of the browser window. This minimalist approach, along with HTML5 and CSS3 support, is intended to let web developers build websites that look and feel much more like Windows applications than websites, Microsoft said. Of course Microsoft really likes that idea.
"We found that users tend to interact with the web site they are browsing, not browser features. They want the browser to be supportive, but not to get in the way," said Ian Moulster, Windows team product manager at Microsoft.
Unlike the earlier platform preview releases, this version of IE9 will replace IE8 on your computer, Microsoft warned, although it can be uninstalled if required. IE9 also does not support Windows XP.
By Rob Coppinger
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