What are the Top New Features in Internet Explorer 9?

It’s not often that an upcoming Internet Explorer release is called “potentially ground-breaking” or even “important”, but where IE 9 is concerned, that’s just the case. It’s no secret that Internet Explorer has commonly been loathed by Web designers and users alike, and it seems like Microsoft has finally buckled down and decided to release a browser with some worth.

As we saw in our browser performance article last week, it’s clear that Microsoft has made huge strides with its browser, as the general performance difference between IE 8 and IE 9 was stark, and more importantly, its Acid3 test score skyrocketed up towards the levels of the competition, which means that the company is finally adhering to common Web standards. That should mean that developers won’t have to continue writing special work-arounds for IE users much longer.

But is this what makes IE 9 “ground-breaking”? Not so much, but it helps. Tech blog ShareTechno takes a look at the features new to IE 9 that might not set it apart so much, but improve the overall experience greatly for its loyal users. Of most interest might be the user interface, which sees a much more minimalist design, on par with Chrome, Opera and soon, Firefox.

“Pinned Sites” is a feature that’s not discussed all too often, but I admit… it’s awesome. It allows you to essentially pin your favorite sites right into the browser, and the result isn’t a full tab, but rather small ones that show the site’s favicon. If you are constantly going to the same site throughout the day, this feature might become one that you’ll rely upon heavily. We’ll see how successful the feature is by whether or not the competition implements similar features in their own browsers.

What might be the best feature is that IE 9 finally implements a proper download manager, which allows you to refer to all of the previous files you’ve downloaded or keep track of multiple downloads at once. This is something that should have been done long ago.

Whether or not IE 9 is going to turn around the browser’s continuous usage decline, it’s hard to say. But I’m personally looking forward to seeing if that will be the case.

This isn’t one of the most obvious new features of IE9, but it may just be our favorite. If you keep the some web applications open all day like Gmail, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, but mistakenly close them when they are lumped together with a bunch of other sites. IE9 lets you separate out those sites and lock them right to the Windows Taskbar. You drag a site to the bar, and when pinned it pulls the favicon so it looks like it’s actually a separate program.