Pitting Internet Explorer 9 RC With Others

The much awaited upgrade to the essentially outdated Internet Explorer 8 i.e. IE9 has been released on 14th March 2011. We got a chance to fiddle around with the release candidate. Let us review our findings.

The first basic thing that hits you when one opens the “new” IE9 browser is it look and feel. Personally, I quite like the look and feel of the IE9 as it has been much improved from its predecessor. The new browser is designed keeping a minimalistic view in mind. But, the very next minute, the idea hits you. This looks like Google Chrome!!! The neat and clear design , the minimalist features, under the hood stuff have been the salient features which have made Google Chrome emerge as a clear favourite for many.

The search box is both the address bar and the search box. Next to that are tabs; to the far right of the screen are discreet icons for your home page, your favourites and your tools.

IE9 has introduced Favicons, essentially favourite icons. And if you drag the favicon from the IE9 box down to your taskbar, you can launch the site direct from that — just like an app. We can now put the tabs on a separate line to make room for more of them (right-click on any tab to choose this).The most popular sites page looks more like the Opera speed dial or the one available in Chrome as well.

Coming to features, the new browser makes use of hardware acceleration. By this we mean that the processing duties have been shifted towards the GPU as opposed to the CPU which means that graphics can be rich and fast. This practically means that the IE9 will perform much better on a better configuration system.

The browser makes use of HTML5 standards, thus, all websites designed using the HTML5 standard would be accessible on this browser. This is to become a hygiene factor for browsers as Chrome and Opera are already out in the market with this feature and it's high time that the explorer came upto standards.

Under the hood, IE9 is using the same engine as its Security Essentials antimalware package, the browser checks websites and downloads and warns you if an app you're downloading isn't signed or a site seems inappropriate.

Privacy is also at the fore in this version of IE. You can block elements of web pages — such as those that gather browsing data, though you have to do so on a site-by-site basis. However, you can't use that to block ads, and at present there isn't a dedicated ad-blocking add-on.

Click on the image to enlarge

The important thing that emerges out of this discussion seems to be the fact that not a lot new is being introduced through IE9. Most of the “new” features may indeed be new for IE but are present in the other browsers already. Thus, it does make sense to upgrade the older version of the browser to the IE9 but changing the browser to an IE9 doesn't seem to be that lucrative a deal.

Performance

Everyday a lot of newer versions of browsers are hitting the market. Some bring actual benefits while oither changes are more or less cosmetic changes which are important nonetheless. So along with IE9RC we went ahead and also benchmarked the latest versions of 3 other major browsers.We utilised 2 online benchmarks.We used an online benchmark called Peacekeeper, designed to test various aspects of a browser, inlcuding rendering, social networking, complex graphics, text parsing, DOM operations, data (string operations), etc. You can access the benchmark online at http://tinyurl.com/ycapktd from the browser that is to be tested. We also tested the browsers for JavaScript performance. We utilised the Sunspider0.9.1 Javascript Benchmark. This is another online benchmark which when accessed from the browser to be tested runs a predefined real world JavaScript on the browser and measures the browsers ability to quickly excecute it. The lesser the time taken the better is the broowser in a real world JavaScript execution environment. The benchmark can be accessed at http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html

During JavaScript execution , IE9RC performed a bit faster than the other browsers compared. IE9 executed the JavaScript in 240 ms. Opera 11, Firefox 4 RC and Google Chrome 10 took 267ms, 266 ms and 261ms respectively. However, in the comprehensive Peacekeeper benchmark, Google Chrome 10 Beta was way ahead of the pack scoring an overall highest at 9560 points. A close second goes to Opera 11with an overall score of 8005. Internet Explorer came in at a distant 3rd with a score of 5435. Firefox 4 RC was worst of the lot scoring the least overall score of 4493. The IE9 has shown much improvement from its predecessor, IE8, which manages a meagre 1056 but the score isn't much to boast about as the other two browsers are leading by a considerable margin.

Bottomline: Much improved from the predecessor, IE9 leads the pack in JavaScript execution. Other than that, IE9 appears to be competing against its predecessor as the other browsers are far ahead in the race.