I’ll be honest: I hardly use Internet Explorer. Google Chrome is my current browser of choice.
When that fails me, Firefox is my backup. The main reason I use Chrome is speed: the browser runs lickety-split on Windows 7 when the network is running smoothly, with minimal latency in page load.
By contrast, IE has always felt slow and clunky, like Web pages had to take a detour through a jar of molasses before arriving in the browser. Even Firefox, which was originally spunky, can feel slow and bloated at times.
IE8 on Windows 7 makes vast improvements in page load time; Microsoft’s browser, in most cases, feels as snappy as Chrome. The IE team at Microsoft aims to continue that trend with Internet Explorer 9, which is now available for public preview.
This pre-release of IE9 is touted as a developer preview, and for good reason there’s not much to it. It installs as a separate application in your system without replacing your current installation of IE8. Open it up, and you’re treated to the world’s most spartan browser interface.
You’ll have to click the Page menu and click Open to navigate to a new site.
As Microsoft discusses on its IE blog, most of the current changes in IE9 are under the hood. IE9 uses hardware acceleration to speed the performance of HTML5, a new version of the Internet’s lingua franca that enables developers to build Flash-like applications in the browser.
The IE team has also rewritten the JavaScript engine so that it runs natively inside of the browser, instead of running inside of a complex scripting architecture that supports various scripting languages.
Unfortunately, even these performance improvements might not be enough. According to the benchmarks released by Microsoft back in March, IE9′s performance still lags behind Firefox and Chrome.
If you’re an end user looking for new features, there’s nothing here for you (yet). A leaked version of the full IE9 browser gives us a small hint of what’s to come when Microsoft releases IE9 Beta in September: features include a new download manager, a Chrome-imitating Start tab, and better add-on management. Those are necessary improvements, but not enough to pull me away from Chrome.
It feels like IE9 isn’t meant for PC end users at all, but is paving the way for fast HTML5 applications on Windows 7 tablet PCs.
Unless the IE team unveils some new features it’s been keeping tucked under its hat come September, it appears that the best Web browsers for Windows 7 will continue to come from outside of Microsoft.
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