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Microsoft has released a public beta of their upcoming browser edition Internet Explorer 9 at an event dubbed "Beauty of the Web." After years of complacency, it looks like the IE team has finally decided to start fighting back in the browser wars. Right now, the choice between IE9, Chrome 6 and Firefox 3.6 is really one of personal taste.
“The browser is a stage. It is the backdrop of the web,” said Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch.

With vrsion 9, Microsoft's browser has been seriously streamlined, and finally starts looking like an application that belongs on modern PCs. The condensed top bar, which squeezes the OneBox,tabs and navigation buttons into a single row, is a welcome change that lets you see more of a website. IE9 is faster, has better support for HTML5 and CSS3, and seems better-tuned to the needs of the user than previous versions did. Microsoft has streamlined the interface, making the browser less apparent and allowing the user to focus more on content. Likewise, the addition of pinned websites makes accessing frequently accessed bookmarks faster and adds some great features by way of jump lists.

New features of version 9

Perhaps the most exciting feature in the newest IE is Pinned Shortcuts. Drag the favicon from the OneBox to your taskbar, and Windows will treat that site as if it were its own application. Clicking on the shortcut will launch the page in its own browser window.

One of the most important improvements IE9 brings to Web developers — the ability to use a wide variety of fonts without having to Photoshop images of them. This alone could save days in the time it takes to create and update websites, and let designers focus more on the design of the site and less on the mechanics of creating it.

IE9 joins the JavaScript speed team, revving up performance in other ways with graphics hardware acceleration. Finally, IE9 has become a "modern" browser , by supporting new Web coding techniques like HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, and SVG.
From OneBox, you navigate directly to a site, search Bing, Google and other services, and pull sites from your history and bookmarks.

You can rearrange tabs by dragging them around, and even "tear" them off the top of the browser to move windows around. If you have Windows 7, you can drag one tab to the left edge of the screen and another to the right.

IE9's design screen is rather spartan, and that's a good thing. There are fewer visible controls at the top of the browser to clutter things up, though the back arrow, much as in Firefox, is larger now because of how frequently people click that button.

Microsoft has built a somewhat Firefox-y looking download manager into Internet Explorer 9. IE users will finally have a single pane which maintains download history and provides centralized access to running or opening downloaded files.

IE9 also adds GPU-accelerated rendering to the browser. At the moment, this is only minimally useful, but it will eventually enable better video playback and high-quality 3-D graphics on the Web.

IE9 harnesses the PC’s hardware to accelerate graphics, videos and text. The result is that IE9 is able to render heavy graphic interfaces far better than even Chrome or Firefox.

The browser is expected to air in 2011 for Windows Vista and Windows 7. The bad news? Microsoft has said it will not support Windows XP, an OS still used by approximately 60 percent of the market. Crashes and irregularities aside, IE 9 is a great direction for Microsoft and its one we hope it is a path the company continues to walk down.

DOWNLOAD LINK for Internet Explorer 9 Beta
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide

Internet Explorer 9 Beta