Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 review

One of the main new features of IE9 is its integration with the Task Bar. By dragging the Fav Icon on a website, you can pin/ Bookmarks to your favourite tabs to the Task Bar, making it quicker to launch them. Some sites support JumpLists to give you quick access to information. For example, with Facebook, you can right-click the Task Bar icon to jump to News, Messages, Events and Friends.

While all of this works really well, the features are Windows specific, so if you use multiple operating systems, Chrome and its ability to sync data between Windows, Mac, Linux and Android 3.0 is probably a better choice, still.

In terms of internet security, Microsoft has done a lot of work. As well as the anonymous InPrivate Browsing mode, which doesn’t store information on any sites you visit, there’s the new Tracking Protection. This is used to prevent your browser from storing tracking cookies, which can be used to target advertising across many websites. For this to work, you have to add tracking lists to the browser. Unfortunately, the link in the browser takes you to the incorrect web page and you need to go to the Microsoft Tracking Protection Lists.

There’s a good range available, including some that allow tracking cookies from ad networks that have proved that they handle user data sensitively. This could be a good option, as the internet is largely funded by online advertising and by blocking all ads from working it can cause harm to your favourite sites. That said, there are lists that block everything, so both sides of the advertising argument are covered.

There’s also SmartScreen Filter, which uses reputation-based statistics to say whether a download is harmful or not. Microsoft has high claims of how good this protection is, but until we’ve run the browser through our AV labs, we can’t make any judgements on how good it is. We like the new Download manager, but given that all of the other browsers have had this functionality built in for a while now, this is Microsoft just playing catch-up.

The interface overhaul takes a little getting used to and we’re not sure that we like the squashed-up address bar. It’s like this so that the browser window has the maximum amount of space. However, given today’s high-resolution monitors we’d have preferred a longer title bar above the tabs bar, giving only slightly less room for the website we were viewing.

There’s no denying that Internet Explorer 9 is a big improvement over the previous one and it’s good to see a download manager and better privacy features. The speed of the browser is also impressive, although this won’t be fully appreciated until more HTML5 websites are available.

Our problem with IE9 is that it’s too focussed on Windows, when other devices and platforms are starting to become more prominent. Currently, then, we think that Google Chrome is a better choice, as it has full bookmark, app, auto-fill, extension, password, preferences and theme syncing across Windows, Linux, Mac and Android 3.0.