Internet Explorer 9 Beta Launch - A New Accelerated Web Experience

A New Accelerated Web Experience

When we got wind that Microsoft was gathering their partners and amassing media around the world for today's Internet Explorer 9 Beta launch, we were quite baffled why there's such a big buzz on a beta product. While there have been several downloadable platform preview variants of Internet Explorer 9, it's not quite the same as using a more 'finalized' product, which culminates in today's kickoff where Microsoft is recommending netizens to give IE9 Beta a go. Below, we've captured in video the walkthrough highlights and a small showcase of what some of the partners had to show on the day of launch:-

Having seen the launch and experienced the demos from developers firsthand today, we daresay that Internet Explorer 9 will pose a serious challenge to the existing browser contenders (finally). To be honest, after IE6, Firefox, Chrome and Opera have made such big advances in supporting what users needed and how they wanted to use the web that Internet Explorer in its seventh and eight incarnations weren't really convincing to those who've switched camps. Well, it might just change with Internet Explorer 9.

Internet Explorer 9 has spruced up the browsing experience a fair bit and delivers:-

• Interoperability as the most standards-compliant browser shipped.
• Speed with hardware accelerated HTML5 by leveraging the GPU and CPU, plus a new JavaScript engine that's multi-core friendly.
• Clean interface and experience by being site-centric instead of browser-centric in usage and feel.
• Trusted because of built-in security, privacy technologies with better reliability.

We share more details on the above aspects in the next few sub sections, but first, here's what you need to get Internet Explorer 9 running in its best form:-

• Windows OS required at minimum is Vista. This is due to the APIs used and functions called are those of the DirectX 10 standard. As such, Vista has become the minimum entry level standard for IE9.
• Works best on Windows 7 with added functionality and support.
• Requires DirectX10 supported GPU to enable hardware accelerated graphics processing.
• System requirements are equivalent to what's required to run Windows 7 or Vista.

Clearly, Microsoft is no longer catering for the lowest common denominator with Internet Explorer 9. With the new browser, Microsoft is ushering in a whole new user experience with the modern web. As such, the entry standard to the next generation of web experience is a lot steeper, but nothing that PCs and notebooks released in the last two years can't handle (if it has DX10 capable GPU to maximize all of what the browser has to offer). One thing's for certain though, and that it would be a long while before business systems roll Internet Explorer 9 into service because of its requirements. For those who are wondering how best to experience the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta, this showcase from the Microsoft Bing team shows off all the best aspects:-

Designed to Support Industry Standards

Most prominently, the existing and previous iterations of Internet Explorer were well behind the curve in supporting full HTML spec and other elements required for a modern rich web media experience. Thankfully this time round, Internet Explorer 9 is much more updated with extensive support for HTML5, CSS3, SVG, new DOM levels and ECMAScript 5.

With Internet Explorer still holding the lion's share of the browser market and for obvious reasons, Microsoft's new browser supporting the latest standards extensively will be very well received by developers. For developers, this means coding their web apps or websites to support the next wave of internet experience is one-time effort as it will work across all browsers that conform to these markup standards.

With far better support for HTML5, Internet Explorer 9 now supports some of the more notable multimedia aspects natively with audio and video elements now recognized. This means developers can insert and manipulate such elements easily without relying on browser plug-ins. For users, expect a more seamless website design as well as lower processing needs. Translate this to mobile devices and enabling such content without plug-ins is a big bonus on many levels from processing, power consumption and ease of use. Think about the iPhone and iPad that won't have to rely on plug-ins or the inability to view Flash enabled content for example.

Adding on, IE9 supports Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and the canvas element of HTML5 which enables dynamic graphics rendering. Again, all of these don't require plug-ins. Plus, Internet Explorer 9 supports hardware accelerated graphics to greatly speed up processing and enable a much better experience. We'll touch more on this in the next section.

The Performance Edge

Some of the most notable aspects readily apparent in Internet Explorer 9 are its performance improvements. The browser uses a new layout system that is optimized for reduced memory footprint and more so for sites designed with HTML5 that may have more graphical elements than usual. This gives rise for a snappier system.

In fact, even simple things like opening new tabs is now an instant process with little to no wait times involved. Microsoft spent much time researching on user needs and to improve these areas. In the context of opening new tabs, it was found that users expected much better response times. Microsoft also studied thousands of websites on how they are designed and what portions of processing constitutes to the most wait time. Averaging their findings, three aspects of processing ate up most time in most sites:- JavaScript, Marshalling and Rendering.

This led to Microsoft tackling these aspects directly with the new Internet Explorer 9. First off, the browser incorporates a new JavaScript engine, Chakra, that's now multi-core friendly. With the average PC system having at least a dual-core processor these days, Chakra helps to compile JavaScript in the background and utilizes available processing cores to speed up the task.

According to Microsoft, this helps IE9 score very well in benchmarks like Sunspider's JavaScript benchmark. Well we managed a brief test on one of the notebooks equipped with multiple browsers and here's how Internet Explorer 9 stacks up to the rest:-

• Opera 10.04 - 406.2ms
• Safari 5.02 - 470.0ms
• Chrome 6.04 - 356.0ms
• Firefox Beta 4 - 610.6ms
• Internet Explorer 9 - 494.0ms

Well, it turns out it isn't on top, but it is very competitive. Still these are rather preliminary results which are at the mercy of the event site's internet connection. So take the numbers with a pinch of salt till we test it back in our lab.

Moving on, Marshalling is the interface/interpretation layer in IE8 between JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM) for a page. Since IE9 now has Chakra which understands the DOM directly, the Marshalling layer is effectively eradicated.

To improve rendering performance, Internet Explore 9 is the first browser to really take advantage of your modern PC system's hardware and OS. Supporting hardware accelerated graphics using DirectX, Direct2D and DirectWrite application programming interfaces (APIs), it renders graphics and text with the assistance of the GPU instead of relying only on the CPU in the past. For sites and web apps that are heavy on the graphics component, such support means that these sites/apps perform fluently as if they were native apps running from the system directly. Furthermore with extensive HTML5 feature support like audio, video and canvas elements, hardware acceleration with the assistance of the OS and GPU ensures much better performance as well as tackling more advanced implementations.

A further note on hardware accelerated graphics processing is the possibility of varied experience of site contents with different system configurations. Microsoft commented that this is an inevitable side effect that is difficult to curb now, but as systems progress, it's likely that many users will have better overall experience in time to come. After all, a lot of the web content currently isn't HTML5 yet.

A Cleaner and More Site-centric Experience

Internet Explorer 9 has a tight integration with Windows 7 OS in terms of user interface and interaction. Site Pinning is a feature that allows you to drag favorite sites on to your task bar which will then interact just like a native application on the system. For example, the pinned favorite site's icons will now support overlay icon functionality such that it gives you status indication like new messages or updates being available.

Right clicking on the pinned icon now gives you Jump Lists to access commonly used searches, functions, features or viewing different sub pages of the site. Here's an example with the Orbitz website:-

Yet another function with pinned sites, depending on site support, is thumbnail preview control. For example, one can pause, rewind, play and access other navigation controls on sites with media content supporting thumbnail preview control - all without opening the page in full view.

Other subtle but still nice enhancements are the cleaner user interface that gives greater weightage and focus to a website's content than the browser. This includes Internet Explorer taking on the icon and colors of the site (note the navigation buttons) such as the snapshot of www.livestrong.com shown below. Also not visible is the new One Box concept which combines the address bar and search functionality in the same box. This is of course new only to IE9 as its competitors have such functions previously.

Safer Downloads, Improved Reliability

Internet Explorer 9 again makes headway in its download manager as the first to incorporate SmartScreen malware protection and download reputation. The latter intervenes to let you know if there are risks involved in downloading particular files/content based on the reputation of these files. This is very much based on a centralized trust system, similar to the one used by Norton's latest antivirus software. Even surfing websites are checked against a trust/report system and if you do try entering one of these suspicious sites, IE9 will throw you a warning with the exact content that could be of threat such as the below screenshot:-

Improving on reliability and usability is hang recovery that is isolated to an individual tab and not the entire browser (about time it got implemented indeed). Another improved feature with IE9 is the add-on performance advisor which notifies you of add-ons that are dragging down overall load time of the site. As mentioned by Microsoft, if the add-ons take more than 0.2 seconds to the overall browsing session, you will be prompted on this and even given an estimation of improvement by disabling add-ons you don't require.

Closing Thoughts

Internet Explorer 9 beta is something everyone should give it a try along with the several examples hosted on Microsoft's IE9 download page. It is all about experiencing the next generation of web content and Internet Explorer has made a few firsts with the beta.

However, a lot of the examples we've seen with the developers are the implementation of a site using HTML5 with heavy graphics rendering content. This latter portion is where Internet Explorer 9's hardware accelerated graphics processing comes into play to speed up the experience. It won't be long before competitors move in to offer their browser versions with similar capabilities. When that happens, it's back to which browser offers the fastest experience and the best feature set. The next browser war battle isn't far off the horizon, but it could be a while before the non beta versions arrive. Already Microsoft isn't yet committing to a final release candidate date for their browser as they hope to amass as much feedback possible to improve their final release. Well, till then, do give it a try and drop in your feedback.

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