Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 release candidate review

The final release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9RC) is now feature complete, according to Microsoft, but no final launch date has been fixed.

Microsoft has put out an IE9 platform preview roughly every eight weeks, so the final version should ship in the next few months, with some industry experts pointing at Microsoft's MIX conference to be held in Las Vegas in April as the release date.

Microsoft is experiencing a steady fall in IE browser usage. Eight years ago IE straddled the globe with usage of more than 95 per cent, but has lost almost 40 per cent, mostly due to Mozilla's Firefox browser. More recently, Google's Chrome browser has taken a bigger share of the market. Microsoft is hoping IE9 will halt the slide.

IE's market share fell almost five per cent to 56 per cent in the past six months, according to NetMarketShare. In the same period Chrome increased its share by almost 4 per cent to 10.7 per cent.

Mozilla's Firefox browser share fell slightly (0.16 per cent) from August 2010 to January 2011, Apple's Safari browser increased its market share by 1.2 per cent over the same period, and Opera saw a drop of nearly 0.2 per cent.

To halt this slide, Microsoft’s browser development team has tuned the performance of IE's JavaScript engine, moved closer to web standards with its adoption of HTML5, and included graphics hardware acceleration so that the browser is capable of offloading complex graphics from the main processor onto a hardware graphics card.

All these improvements mean that the browser will be capable of delivering more complex content. It also prepares IE for the anticipated adoption of Web-based applications delivered over both private and public cloud infrastructures in which more tasks will be pushed down to the browser.

Previously in IE9
The feature set has piled up since Microsoft's development team started work on IE9. IE9 now has graphics hardware acceleration, pinned websites, better add-on management, a combined search and URL address bar, jumplists, security enhancements such as the download manager, a completely rejigged JavaScript engine, and far better web standards support. The last version made available by the IE9 development team was the IE9β.

Install
We installed IE9RC on several systems, including an Asus Eee PC Seashell 1015PEM, a Dell Optiplex 980, our Labs standard Core 2 Duo test system, and a semi-ruggedised Tablet PC, the Handheld Group AB's Algiz 7 provided by Mobexx.

Major new features
Tracking protection
Even at the final release candidate stage it’s interesting to see Microsoft putting in new features, chief of which is tracking protection. This allows users to prevent web advertisers tracking their behaviour by creating a list of sites they do not want advertising from, and preventing analytics engines tracking them.

Funnily, the feature appears to be so new that hitting the 'Learn more about Tracking Protection' link brings up a link saying, 'Topic not found' [see picture].

W3C geolocation API support
By implementing the geolocation feature, users can allow websites they visit to check their location (as a latitude-longitude coordinate pair) and to target content based on that location. IE9RC uses a Microsoft service to work out where you are, using your IP address and any available Wi-Fi data.

This feature has been available on other browsers for a long time. For example, Mozilla had geolocation in version 3.5 of the Firefox browser in June 2009.

Google WebM video format
Microsoft has added support for Google's WebM technology, a potential competitor to the industry standard video codec AVC/H-264. Although arguments about whether WebM is truly open source and royalty-free could scupper its adoption.

Browser-based battery life conservation
IE9RC enables reduced power consumption now that Microsoft has integrated its Chakra JavaScript engine into the power settings, which means users can choose to set the JavaScript Engine Timer to power savings mode [see picture].

ActiveX filtering
IE9RC's new ActiveX filtering system allows users to control what ActiveX elements are displayed on sites they visit, which means they have better management over potentially unsafe ActiveX controls.

Web standards
Microsoft's move to more closely embrace web standards is to be applauded, but some companies will have to rewrite their websites as a result.

There have also been many small but significant tweaks in the user interface. For example, users can now opt to have the tabs on a separate row from the address bar.

Performance
The performance benchmark used was FutureMark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark. For measuring adherence to web standards, the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test was used.

The test was run using a Dell Optiplex 980 desktop system dual booting with Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit edition) and Windows 7 Professional (32-bit edition).

With Futuremark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark run on Windows 7 Professional (32-bit), Google’s Chrome browser (v9.0.597.98) and Opera’s (v11.01) were the fastest, with Internet Explorer 9 RC and Apple’s Safari 5.0.3 next and then Firefox 3.6.13 [see picture].

When the same browsers were run under Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit edition) no significant changes in which browser performed best were noted.

With the standards compliance test Acid3, Google’s Chrome, Opera and Apple’s Safari brower all demonstrated 100 per cent compliance, with Internet Explorer 9 RC and Firefox, showing 95 and 94 per cent respectively.

Conclusions
An interesting update, which Microsoft's now says leaves IE9 feature complete.

IE9 will put Microsoft back in the browser game, but the company’s big problem is that the other browser manufacturers' development timelines are much shorter than Microsoft's, allowing them to expand their feature set faster. For example, Google Chrome's first stable release was December 2008 and it's now working on version 10.