Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 9

PanARMENIAN.Net - Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9, in the latest attempt to compete in the increasingly crowded browser marketplace. With Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox both growing in leaps and bounds, will IE9 be enough to “unleash a more beautiful web” as Microsoft is promising.

Internet Explorer 9 has been through months of testing, with a beta version released in September 2010. The beta version has been downloaded over 25 million times since then, with two million downloads in the first two days alone. The more minimal and altogether less confusing design of IE9 quickly became a hit with beta testers, and Microsoft hopes this will transfer over to a wider demographic.

According to the GeekWithLaptop, Internet Explorer 9 is a pretty big leap for Microsoft, a company who are not known for boldly changing their mind. IE9 is a major departure in terms of design, and a definite evolutionary step forward in terms of speed and capability. It includes a fast Javascript rendering engine, extensive support for HTML5, and hardware acceleration for web-page rendering.

In fact, IE9 is ahead of the curve in many ways, as both Chrome and Firefox are yet to roll out this kind of hardware acceleration. However, hardware acceleration can only be used on HTML5 content, which means this feature is probably not as revolutionary as the Microsoft marketing team would have us believe. IE9 is also widely believed to be faster than the current versions of both Chrome and Firefox, the website says. Despite these many improvements however, it is the design of IE9 that is going to make most people sit up and pay attention. Along with a more minimal design that moves the address bar along side the tabs to create more space, you can also use the address bar for searching if you desire and even view results from within the address bar.